Passages

by Olan Thorensen

  The blacksmith smacked his generous paunch. “Just asking because the way you’re muscled speaks of heavy work, though you’re leaner than most smiths.”

  “I have,” answered Mark, “though not enough to call myself a blacksmith.”

  “Well, I’ve a nephew who’s starting a smithy twenty miles from here. Since he’s family, I offered to help make all the tools and equipment he’ll need. Turns out my nephew was too ambitious, and it’s a big job. I could use some assistance if you’re interested in staying a while. Can’t say what I’ll pay you until I see what you can do, but you look strong enough. I should get some use out of you, even if I only provide food and a place to sleep dry.”

  I have to quit moving constantly sometime, Mark thought, so why not here?

  “All right. I’m interested.”

  “After I finish your horse, I have another small job for today, so we can start tomorrow. My name is Ilmar Nestun, what’s yours?”

  Mark just stood there, stumped. He hadn’t considered what name he’d use. Was he far enough from Brawsea to use his own name? He didn’t know. If he used another name, what would it be? Nothing popped into his head until he reviewed the last sixdays’ wandering south, not sure what he’d find.

  “Kris Kolumbus. My name is Kris Kolumbus.”

  He stayed in Vynmor for three sixdays. He helped Nestun in the mornings and found manual labor jobs in the afternoon—clearing land, chopping wood, and tearing down a dilapidated barn. When it was time for him to leave, his hair and beard were long enough that he didn’t seem out of place, his coin purse was a little heavier than when he’d arrived, and his wound was completely healed.

  “Sorry you’re going, Kris,” said Nestun. “You don’t have experience at blacksmithing, but you’ve got the knack for it. If you were to stay and work with me, I’d look for more jobs as you got more experience. I could even see us being partners in a couple of years.”

  “Thanks, Ilmar, but I’ll be moving on. I hear the land turns to ranching farther south. I think I’d like to try ranch work for a while. If that doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll come back to Vynmor.”

  Mark had no intention of returning. The time in the village had been quiet, but he still felt too close to Brawsea. He hoped after a few hundred more miles he would feel different.

  For the next month, he meandered another two hundred miles south. A series of forested hills and low mountains separated valleys and plains where farms gradually gave way to ranches. He stopped for up to a sixday to work, replenish supplies, and occasionally stay at inns to clean up and treat himself to an evening of beers. It was in the town of Ursalyn, population around two thousand, where he chanced on a rancher recruiting riders to hunt for and gather cattle. They had been scattered widely by the same storm Mark had sheltered from in a cave for two days.

  It took two sixdays of long hours to collect most of the cattle until the owner was satisfied. Mark was paid for his work, but the most important result was that he remembered what it was like growing up on his family’s ranch near Pueblo, Colorado. His father insisted on calling it a ranch, even though most years they made more income from farming wheat than raising cattle. Yet whatever it was called, during his teenage years Mark couldn’t wait to be off to college, which turned out to be the United States Naval Academy.

  Now, near the town of Ursalyn, in central Frangel, on the continent of Drilmar, on the planet Anyar, Mark experienced muscle memory—the retention of motor skills learned deeply enough to be drawn on without conscious effort. The days he spent chasing and herding cattle seemed like a natural activity and surfaced memories that led him to reconcile that he didn’t hate the family tasks of his youth. He acknowledged that his distaste for ranch life might have disguised a youthful urge to be on his own and away from what he perceived to be a boring existence. What he did know was that the dark cloud over his mind and feelings since Kaledon noticeably thinned while he worked cattle.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said aloud to his horse. “I’m supposed to hate chasing these stupid steaks-on-the-hoof. All right, all right! So maybe I was just a dumb teenager thinking I had to be rebellious against something. Quite nagging on me, you nag.”

  A brindle cow and her calf broke in opposite directions. Mark directed Secretariat after the calf, assuming the mother wouldn’t go far from her child. He’d become fond of the horse he’d ridden since Brawsea. Maybe he mentally assumed a common bond between the two fugitives, and the horse was his only living connection to his time on Anyar. It was only after Vynmor that he quit referring to the animal as “horse” and gave it a name. He didn’t know why “Secretariat” jumped into his mind, except that it was one of the few movies he’d chosen to see more than once. Maybe because the original Secretariat was so strong in his triumphs, Mark hoped some of that would wear off on him—not that he could identify what a “triumph” would be, not after Kaledon and Tregallon.

  Once he had a rope on the calf, the mother followed it back to the day’s gathering site. “There you go,” he said. As both cattle merged with the others in a deep dell, Mark signaled to the rancher.

  “I saw a couple more cattle farther up the hill from where I found these two. Me and Secretariat will head back in that direction.”

  “You still haven’t explained to me where you got the name Secretariat.”

  “I told you. It’s a famous horse where I come from.”

  “Famous for what? Certainly not for racing in this part of Frangel, or I would have heard the name.”

  “Well, you know how it is. What’s famous in one part of Frangel might not be known in other parts.”

  The rancher waved a hand in good-natured dismissal.

  When Mark left Ursalyn, he headed southwest, deeper into ranch country. For hundreds of miles, he continued to use the name Kris Kolumbus. His coin supply dwindled, as he stopped less often to replenish it. When he came to Nurburt, the biggest town since he’d left Brawsea, he estimated the population was twenty thousand or more. The town was located about eleven hundred miles south of the Frangel capital. His urge to keep moving slackened and was replaced by a need to stay in one place longer than a few sixdays. He began thinking, consciously for the first time, about finding some version of a “home”—a place to live the rest of his life. His questions included whether Nurburt was the place and whether he was far enough from the guilds.

  He took a leap of faith on using his real name one evening while sharing steins of beer in a pub. For the last sixday he had relaxed more than in the past months. He exchanged work on repairing fences and stable walls for a cot in a tack room. Evenings, he frequented the same pub and made an effort to engage other patrons. On one of those evenings, the next chapter in his Anyar life began.

  “Yes, a man can make a livelihood trading for furs in the south, Kaldwel,” exclaimed a wiry middle-aged man named Runold. “But you need to live near your trap lines most of the year. The lonely country is not for me. No, there’s a better option. I tell you, there’s real coin to be made from destrex hunting, Yeah, the creatures are dangerous, but men are killed when there’s only one or two of them on the hunt. With five or six men, it should be safe enough. Even with that many, the payoff is still good since the hides sell for so much.”

  Runold was sitting at a table with Mark and two other men.

  “What’s a destrex?” asked Mark before his beer-softened brain could override his mouth. His entire time on Anyar, he’d made a point of saying as little as possible to hint he was anything but another citizen, albeit from a different part of Frangel.

  Three pair of eyes swiveled to the source of the curious question.

  He hustled to recover. “You know, there may be different types of destrex this far south. I’m from farther west-northwest, toward the Timbar Sea.”

  “I don’t know about destrex there, but here we have two kinds—ormals and oklands.”

  “I hear the ormals are the worst to hunt, even though they’re smaller,” said the man with rum
my eyes whose name Mark never learned.

  “Yeah,” said Runold. “Damn things can change their hides to look so much like wherever they are, you can almost bump into them before you know they’re there.”

  A chameleon? thought Mark. Bump into them? How big are these things?

  “What’s the biggest one you’ve ever seen?” asked Mark, preempting the talk before he slipped again and the men realized he’d never heard of destrex.

  “Well . . . there was a dead one that must have gone twenty feet.”

  “Twenty feet!” exclaimed one of the other men. “My God! I didn’t realize they came that big.”

  You know, thought Mark, I don’t believe any of these guys have ever actually seen a live whatever they’re called.

  “Of course, if you’re going to go destrex hunting, why not go all the way to the oklands?” said Runold. “Their hides might not conceal them as much, but they stay looking the same after tanning—not like an ormal hide that fades with time. Still, somewhere around two large gold coins for a single okland hide makes a little risk understandable.”

  Holy shit! thought Mark. Two large golds. That’s around $2,500 by my conversions.

  Mark went fishing again. “Yes, if you’re going destrex hunting, go for the big payoff. Imagine that much coin for one hide.”

  “Of course, there’s a reason not that many okland hides are available, even if a good one is worth ten large golds in the big cities up north. The big beasts are hard to kill because the hide is so tough. That’s part of the reason they’re in such demand for boots and other leatherwork, especially to the Fuomi and Harrasedics.”

  Twelve-thousand-dollar equivalents in the large cities! Mark thought. Double holy shit.

  “I’ve never thought about hunting destrex, but how would one go about it?” he asked.

  “Hah!” crowed Runold. “That’s what I hoped to hear. I’ve a sense you’re a good man to depend on. Me and three others are planning to go destrex hunting. Word is the territory a hundred and fifty miles east-southeast of Nurburt has plenty of them. We think the four of us should be enough, but since it’s our first time, I figure another man or two is prudent. Even with six of us, a single okland hide divides pretty well. Naturally, we’d hope to shoot more than one.”

  Mark had hunted with his father, brothers, and cousins. The mountains within driving range of the family ranch had hunting seasons for bear, puma, elk, deer, bighorn sheep, and Rocky Mountain goats. He always declined to hunt with the other family men for bear or mountain goats. He thought the numbers of both were small enough that they shouldn’t be hunted. Plus, no one he knew ate bear, and rumors were that mountain goats tasted like leather and were as tough.

  “As I said, with five or six men it should be safe enough,” Runold assured him. “How about it, Kaldwel, you up for joining in?”

  “Sounds good,” said Mark. “I don’t have any plans or work lined up right now, so I’ll join in on the hunt, as long as we share equally. When do we leave?”

  “If you can be ready at sunup tomorrow, we’ll head east to the pass over the mountains and then into the plains beyond.”

  The next morning, they followed a road south and pushed hard. They cleared the pass three days later. A dusting of snow fell at the crest. From there, it was sharply downhill with views of seemingly endless flatlands in front of them.

  Most of the hunting party failed to impress Mark. Runold seemed all right, as did a sixth man Runold had found at the last minute—a tall, stringy man who didn’t seem to have a name. Runold explained the man had an accent because he was originally from Madyrna, the realm to the east. Why he was in Frangel wasn’t clear, but Runold implied it involved an involuntary decision.

  As for the other three men, Mark thought they resembled Frangel versions of something between gutter sweepings and street thugs. He resolved to talk with Runold if they managed to kill one of the destrex. He worried he’d need to watch his back in case one or more of the three men was tempted to reduce the number of partners.

  It was when they reached the last trees—stunted, scrawny growths that became shorter the farther south they traveled—that Runold made an announcement.

  “There it is. This low brush continues another couple hundred miles before other plants take over. However, this type of growth runs the entire width of Drilmar, except for north to south mountain ranges. Here’s where the destrex supposedly prefer to live and hunt prey.”

  “What do they hunt?” asked Mark, who then hurried to hide his ignorance. “I can’t recall hearing what’s the local prey.”

  “There’s three or four different animals large enough to be hunted by destrex. Or is it four or five? I forget. Some of them live alone or in small groups. Others are in herds that run into the hundreds. My great-grandfather once told me that the herds ran into the many thousands when he was a boy, and they ranged all the way north of Nurburt.”

  “That must have meant the destrex were also found that far north,” said Mark.

  “Yeah, but not anymore. Our best chance to find a destrex is to follow a moderate-size group of browsers at a distance. Once a destrex makes a kill, it’ll guard it from another destrex. Then we can approach and kill it.”

  “Must be dumb beasts to just sit,” commented one man.

  “I don’t know,” said Runold. “They’ve a reputation for being clever.”

  Probably because they evolved as the apex predator in this part of Drilmar, thought

  Mark. They don’t run off if they don’t think anything is a threat to them.

  He remembered how mountain lions were often hunted in Colorado. Mark had demurred in accompanying his cousins when one of them procured a mountain lion hunting license. The standard tactic was to use dogs. Once they had the scent, a pack of dogs would trail the big cat until they got close. The cat would climb a tree, then wait for the dogs to realize it was out of reach and leave. The hunters would follow the dogs and shoot the animal that had evolved to climb a tree to put it out of reach of predators larger than itself. Mark didn’t tell his cousins his opinion of their “sport.”

  “We’ll camp here tonight and start looking for animals to follow tomorrow.”

  Mark’s unease about his companions grew when they wanted to camp next to a stream but with no other protection, and they proposed a single guard at night. When Mark insisted on two guards, one near the staked horses and the other tending a campfire to be kept going all night, most of the other five men thought it was probably a good idea.

  Dawn the next morning solidified Mark’s opinion of their venture when he went to urinate and found the horse guard sleeping.

  What the hell was I thinking of to join these idiots? he wondered.

  He kicked the man’s boot. “I’m a destrex and just chomped your goddamn head off!”

  Mark saw two choices: head back north and leave the other five to their own devices or take charge. By a very slim margin, he chose the latter option. Runold surprised him by not arguing.

  Maybe it’s a good sign that at least Runold has reservations about these bozos, thought Mark. Or maybe it means we really should get our butts out of here.

  Finding prey animals proved easy enough that it almost raised Mark’s mood. When they went to saddle up, a group of fifteen to eighteen lombars were grazing within a hundred yards of the horses; that’s what Runold called the animals that looked like a horse crossed with a camel. They took off when the largest one in the group spied the humans.

  Hmmm, thought Mark. They didn’t seem to mind the horses but were afraid of people. Maybe they were okay with our horses because they were other grazing animals? Something like in Africa where zebras, gnus, and giraffes provide added senses against lions. But they recognize humans as predators or something unknown.

  They followed the lombars all day, staying far enough away not to spook the animals but still maintain visual contact of the drifting, grazing animals. At mid-afternoon, they accidentally came within two hundred yards of th
e lombars and their party’s first sight of a destrex. Fortunately for the humans, the destrex was focused on other prey.

  Mark’s first reaction was amusement. He flashed to watching videos with his daughter when she was four. The creature resembled a cartoon alligator standing high on four long legs, instead of belly on the ground and propelled by splayed legs. While Mark watched, the hide’s color subtly changed as if a breeze wafted over short grass.

  In an instant, his amusement vanished. He stared, aghast, as the destrex exploded, sprinting after the lombars faster than Mark knew their horses could run. The prey scattered, except for one knocked off its feet and held to the ground by a clawed front foot. The doomed animal began screaming as the destrex tore off chunks of its flesh to swallow whole. Mark cringed.

  Runold broke the six men’s silence when he whispered, “Are we close enough to shoot from here?”

  “How the hell do I know?” said Mark before realizing he’d used English. He switched to Frangelese. “You’re the one supposed to know such things.”

  “There’s six of us with muskets. That should be enough.”

  “Yeah, if we all hit the damn thing,” said Mark. “What’s the chance of that at this range? We’ll be lucky to get three hits.”

  “Oh, shit,” said another man. “You mean we’re going closer?”

  “Remember, they’ll stand to guard their kill,” said Runold.

  The destrex spotted them and assumed a defiant stance over its finally dead victim. It put out a screeching call and showed an impressive mouth full of jagged teeth.

  “What do you think? Closer? A hundred yards before firing?” Runold asked Mark.

  “Better make it closer to be sure we get enough hits, but let’s do it spread out a little, and go slow so it keeps eating.”

  They staked the two packhorses and aligned their horses to face the carnage. When they moved apart, Mark made sure he was on one end of their line. He figured the beast would likely charge the center of their group.