by Ron Miller
Bronwyn tries to not pay any attention to the approaching banner of dust, or to the sound of hooves thundering from the hills around them. It no longer seems possible that they will be able to reach the river, and cross it, before the pursuers reach the lock and see them.
The Moltus, when they arrive, is more or less as Janos had described it. It is perhaps three hundred feet wide but very shallow, judging by the numerous rocks that protrude from its surface; perhaps nowhere more than two or three feet deep. But the current is swift, the clear water cut into foaming ribbons by the jagged rocks. And while the river is not deep, it is deep enough. Even Thud would not be able to resist the force of the rapid stream with only rocks slippery with moss and algae for footing.
“Damn it!” curses Bronwyn, which she repeats a moment later because, looking back toward the lock, she sees that the plume of dust has disappeared. Its remnants are drifting raggedly over the hilltops, dispersed by the breeze.
“They’re at the lock! I wish I knew how far the ford is! Or which way, for that matter.”
She hopes the Guards will not be too hard on the gypsies, still, and she does feel a small pang of guilt at the thought, it would serve to delay the pursuit a little.
They are standing on a narrow path, little more than a deep groove cut into the bank of the river. Countless generations of shepherds and goat herders, to say nothing of countless sheep and goats, had created it while on their way from farm to mountain pasture ‘she supposes all this, having no idea what people actually do with sheep and goats). It would surely lead to a ford shallow enough for the small animals to safely cross, but in which direction is it? There is no way to tell.
On the basis that the path to the right heads north, she turns in that direction. The path, thankfully, is clear of stones and the triply damned vine and is packed almost as hard as cement. She and Thud break into a trot.
They have covered only a few hundred yards when they hear the first shot. Looking across the plain, they can see the dark figures of the mounted riders. As they watch, there is a flash and a puff of smoke. A second later comes the sharp crack of the exploding cartridge. They are either still beyond the range of the rifles or present too small a target for the charging riders. Or perhaps they were just warning shots. Bronwyn has no idea, nor does she much care, as the results are the same: they are as yet unpierced by lead; a situation, she realizes, that can change for the worse at any moment.
She and Thud break into a run, or as much of an imitation of one as their full loads, and Thud’s physique, allow. Bronwyn thinks the pain she has felt running through the alleys of Blavek is nothing compared to this. The stitch in her side has returned; the pain is bad enough, but perhaps not as bad as the frustration of trying to run upright while cramping muscles are trying to roll her into a ball. Bullets begin raising jets of dirt and splinters of rock from around them, each hard whack! of an impact making Bronwyn wince as though the bullet had hit her.
Then the trail suddenly makes a right-angle turn to the left and there it is: the ford, a widening of the river where the water is so shallow the princess can see the gravel on its bottom as far out as the middle of the stream. Without hesitating, she calls to Thud to hurry and then plunges into the water. The icy liquid feels like broken glass on her bare, lacerated ankles. They run, high-stepping, through the water, their feet pumping explosions of spray that drenches them. Smaller geysers erupt around them as more of the pursuing Guards find their range. She can hear them shouting. She realizes then that their intent is not necessarily to kill her or Thud, at least until the packets of letters have been retrieved. Still, she feels sure there would be few reprimands should a stray bullet find its way into the back of her head.
They reach the west bank of the Moltus at the same time the Guards reach the ford. There are ten mounted men. Their leader loses valuable seconds in allowing his men to mill about while he shouts to the fugitives to surrender themselves. He is, of course, ignored.
The west bank is steep and rugged, with piles of broken and precipitous boulders that have tumbled down the steep slopes. Black, shaggy pines, with trunks as straight as rockets and as big around as Thud, grow to the water’s edge. By the time the Guard captain realizes that he is being pointedly ignored, Thud and Bronwyn have scrambled to a position on the opposite bank well above his head and are now dodging between massive trunks and lichen-mottled rocks. The captain, followed by five of his men, charges into the river. The remaining four continue to pour rifle fire into the trees. The girl and the big man are not looking back.
The steep hillside is a jumble of shattered boulders, some as large as houses, and the fallen trunks of dead or uprooted trees with a maze of passages between them, like a rabbit warren or ant farm. They have to clamber over or crawl through these, while bullets whip through the brush around their heads like angry hornets. It is painful and exhausting; their clothing is being shredded by plucking branches and knife-edged rocks, their hands and knees are bleeding, and what isn’t bleeding is abraded or bruised. Nevertheless, the further they penetrate the forest and the higher they climb above the river, the safer they become.
Rounding a boulder that protrudes from the hillside like a charwoman’s wart, Bronwyn risks a backward reconnoiter from its shelter. Below, the captain and his men have reached the west bank, but are foiled by its steepness. The chase can not be continued by mounted soldiers. The captain regroups the five Guards who have accompanied him and returns to the east bank where the remaining four are still firing into the trees, albeit rather half-heartedly.
“They’ll be after us on foot,” says Bronwyn, “but I think it’s going to take them a few minutes to get organized.”
“Let’s keep going up, then.”
“Right you are. I don’t believe they can go any faster than we can; if we can just keep up our lead we might be all right. The leader’ll send at least one man back with the news, and he’ll probably leave one or two with the horses. There’ll be that many fewer to worry about.”
They turn from the sheltering stone and continue on up the slope. Above that point, the way became a little easier. It is as steep as ever, but less rocky and with fewer fallen trees. The short late-autumn day, however, is ending. The sun is already brushing the ridge of hills above them. Darkness will come early in the shadow of the mountains. The air is growing rapidly chill. They have gained only a few hundred feet when they hear the first crashing of the Guards behind them. The captain is shouting for them to stop.
He must think I’m an idiot!
The diagonal course they are forced to take in climbing the hill takes them in an ascending curve around its slope. Though the Guards are close behind, they are out of the line of sight. Nevertheless, Bronwyn and Thud are only minutes from being overtaken. Their path dips into a narrow gully or cleft; this makes a sharp turn and they find themselves suddenly in daylight once more. Before their dismayed eyes is a chasm: the cleft has emitted them high up on the side of a steeply sloping cliff. Or rather, now that there is a moment to observe their situation, near the rim of a vast bowl.
A boulder-strewn crater has been carved from the hill as though some monstrous hand has scooped the earth away, leaving behind a vast, canted hollow. It is perhaps half a mile or more to the opposite side. The bowl is tilted so the uphill rim is several hundred feet higher than the downhill rim. The bottom is covered with boulders of all sizes, which have undoubtedly broken from the sides over the centuries and tumbled to the lowest point. It reminds Bronwyn of a wooden bowl filled with assorted nuts.
A large stream, some tributary of the Moltus, no doubt, is pouring into the crater from its upper rim, tumbling in a frothing cataract over, under, around and through the confused mass of shattered rock, finally disappearing through a gap in the lower rim, below Bronwyn to her right, beyond which it is lost among the trees. She realizes immediately that it would be possible to pick her way from boulder to boulder, making a circuit midway between the edge of the cirque and the shall
ow pools at its bottom, but there would be no way to do it without presenting an excellent target for anyone standing where she is now.
“Keep on going,” says Thud to the princess, slipping his bulky pack from his shoulders.
“What?”
“Just go, please,” he answers while wrenching a massive oak branch from where it had wedged itself in falling from the edge of the cliff above them. It is as long as the girl and as thick as one of her thighs.
“You’ll never be able to stop them with that!”
“Sure I can! They can’t see me before coming around this bend. I’ll surprise them.”
“You can’t! There’re too many! And as soon as they find out what’s going on, they’ll pick you off from above. They might try to take me alive, but they don’t care about you!”
“I can at least keep them busy. If I don’t try, they’ll catch us for sure. I know it’s not much of a chance, but it’s the only chance you have. Don’t you see?”
Bronwyn does see. She has seen from the first that their flight is hopeless and that Thud’s ambush, while ultimately futile, is her only chance to gain a lead. But she is loath to abandon her friend. If she leaves him, it would be the last time she’d see him alive. And what would she do without him? She’d be alone.
“Princess, all the things you told me, about your brother being king and that fellow that wants to ruin everything and those letters and all; I don’t understand it all, but it sounds a lot more important than me. I know what’s worrying you: you’re worried about me dying. Well, I’m going to anyway, I guess. But if I do I’d like to die for something. I’ve never done anything important before.”
“All right, Thud.”
Thud is wrong in one point in his argument, however: Bronwyn is not so much concerned with what his dying meant to him as by what his death would mean to her. At the moment, her thoughts are not occupied with the potential reality of a very nice person being dead, they are occupied with the terror of having to be alone, and alone in a trackless wilderness to boot. However, if the choice is between them both dying or just Thud dying, it isn’t a difficult one for her to make.
“Maybe you’ll kill them all!”
“Maybe. I’m sure going to try.”
“Well, good luck!”
She begins to turn from him, half of her mind thinking that Thud is stupid to stay behind, the other half thinking herself incredibly lucky that he is so stupid. No, she suddenly contradicts herself, he is not...hasn’t she just been telling people that he isn’t? He’s being...decent, and it has nothing to do with the Princess Bronwyn. He’s just doing what has to be done. Impulsively, and before her normal personality can reassert itself, she pulls the surprised Thud to her, hugs him around what passes for a neck and kisses him quickly on his cheek.
“Goodbye, Thud!”
Before either one can say anything further, and sparing both a great deal of embarrassment, there came a crashing from nearby.
“They’re here! Hurry!” says Thud, hefting his club and taking a step back toward the bend in the trail.
Bronwyn hesitates only an instant, then turns and flees toward the falls. There is no longer any path; she has to hop and scramble from stone to stone, and most are lubricated with dark green algae and moss. Behind, she can hear surprised shouts and a single shot but doesn’t dare turn to look. When she finally reaches the cataract, she is forced to pause, daunted by the cascading water. There is the sound of another shot and a rock by her foot explodes. She turns then and sees a terrific battle taking place at the rim of the crater. Two Guards are down, one lying at Thud’s feet, the other draped across a rock several yards below, trickles of blood candy-striping the green stone. Two others are wrestling to pass Thud while at the same time trying to get an opportunity to use their sabers. The last two have retreated to climb higher up the rim of the cirque. They have no clear view of the fight taking place below them but they do have an unimpeded prospect of the girl, not a hundred yards away. They try another shot and this one passes through the pack Bronwyn is wearing, from side to side. Thus encouraged, she leaps into the stream, bracing herself against the water crashing against her at several angles from above, trying to find footing on the slick, polished rocks. Another bullet flies past her ear like a meteor.
It is rapidly getting dark and the cirque is awash in amethyst light. Very soon she will be invisible within the mosaic of darkening shadows. She has her sights set on a mass of angular boulders on the far side of the stream that would easily provide shelter against the marksmen, who would be no more likely to try navigating the rocks in the dark than she.
If she had her sights set lower, however, she might not have placed her foot on a rock that has been carved by the rushing water into the shape of a scoop. It is as smooth as glass and lubricated by a thin coating of algae. Her foot shoots out from under her and she lands back first in the rushing water, only the cushioning of the clothes-filled pack preventing her spine from breaking. The stream spins her in a half-circle, rolling her down the rocks for several yards. She catches herself when her left leg jams into a cleft. This saves her from a precipitous tumble into a shallow pool twenty feet below but wrenches her knee painfully. She heaves herself half-sitting, sputtering and coughing a lungful of water, catches at a dry rock and pulls herself onto a kind of spur between branches of the cataract. Rolling onto her stomach, she turns her face toward her enemies.
Thud has one of the Guards pinned to the rock face by the simple expedient of leaning his vast back against the man, while the other has finally gotten enough clearance to pull his saber. Thud parries the first two blows with his oak bludgeon, then jams the end of the log into the man’s face. The saber doesn’t have the mass to deflect such a heavy weapon and is sent flying over the brink, winking purplely in the dim glow of twilight. The Guard stumbles backwards, his last step being into space, and he follows his weapon down to the rocks below.
Then something happens that Bronwyn can’t believe. There is a splitting, ripping, cracking, shattering sound, like Musrum tearing the seat of his titanic trousers. The rim of the cirque on which Thud and the remaining Guard are battling slips away from the surrounding rock like a calving glacier. Bronwyn sees the two men, momentarily, stuck to the face of the collapsing wall like flies on a swatter, before an explosion of dust and earth envelops them. The cloud rushes over her, damping the sound of the avalanche. The thundering crash threatens to pitch her into the cataract as the ground bounces in empathic response to the landslide. The dust remains hanging in the air as the echoes died. The bowl-shaped cirque holds it cupped, as though the motionless atmosphere itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what unimaginable catastrophe has just occurred. The dust blocks the glow from the twilit sky; the crater is filled with obscurity.
“Thud!” Bronwyn cries again and again, but there is no answer other than the irresponsibly careless laughter of the stream.
She continues on as best she can. The temperature has dropped rapidly once the sun sets. She is wet through and through and shivers violently. Her knee is swollen and each step makes it throb painfully. She is no longer on a route that circumnavigates the crater but is instead more or less descending into its depths. She is beyond the cataract, or at least its main course since she is still splashing through icy rivulets. It is one of these that nearly finishes her right then.
The darkness within the crater is treacherous; the princess has to feel her way from one smooth, slippery boulder to another. Her only consolation is that it would be equally difficult for the remaining two Guards to follow her. With any luck, she hopes, they’ll break their necks. But then, her luck as of late hasn’t been so very good, she decides, and it might very well be her own neck in jeopardy. She would be relatively safe until morning if she can use every moment to increase the distance between herself and her pursuers. Safe, that is, from capture or murder. Death from accident is imminent; she risks disaster with every step she takes. Any broken limb would immobilize her:
she needs arms and hands as well as legs to navigate the wilderness of boulders that fills the bowl of the cirque. If anything like that happened, and she isn’t discovered, she’d quickly die of exposure. Still, the crater is not that large. Has it been daylight, she could have scrambled out of it in a matter of minutes. As it is, she will have to be extraordinarily lucky to reach the opposite rim by dawn.
Her luck is not extraordinary. She steps into a rivulet winding from between a pair of mammoth rocks and her foot shoots from under her. She lands in the stream, her breath knocked from her in a grunt, slides a yard or two, bounces with a sickening crunch against some rocks and suddenly there is nothing beneath her. There is a split second of vertigo before she finds herself plunging into water over her head. It is as though she has been suddenly imbedded in a slab of black marble. She has no sense of up or down. She thrashes wildly, panicked, and swallows water. Suddenly her head breaks the surface and she gasps a lungful of air before the waterlogged pack pulls her back under. She wrestles out of it, thrusting herself back to the surface. She discover that she is in a small pond. In the starlight, she can see the ripples in its surface and above her the black silhouette of the ledge from which she has fallen. A foot-wide torrent arches from its lip and splashes into the pond with a hollow gargling. The edge of the pool is only a few yards away and she pushes herself toward it. Her swimming abilities are limited to a kind of dog-like crawl, which is severely hampered by the sodden clothing that is probably doubling her weight. Grasping at rocks and the gnarled driftwood caught between them, she drags herself from the water. She lies for a few moments, legs still in the icy pond, letting her retching stomach pump the water out of her. Now Bronwyn really is freezing. She is exhausted and the fires of her metabolism are burning low. She is wet to the skin and has no means of creating a fire. Blankets and extra clothing are at the bottom of the pond. She now realizes that, even wet, their woolen layers would have insulated her from the cold air that is pouring into the cirque from the mountains above it. Against the indigo sky she can see the lower, downhill rim of the crater. It is only a few score feet above her but she has neither the energy nor the courage to go any further.