by R Magnusholm
“So do you.”
“Thanks.” She smoothed her hand over his chest. “Something wonderful happened to us when we fell into that space-time portal.”
“We were rejuvenated and healed. We might even be immortal. However—” He fingered a scratch on his right forearm. “However, we can be hurt. But there’s one thing I know for sure . . .”
“What thing?”
“My mini-me works the same. I have perfect control.”
“I trust you, but on some level, I still worry.” She yawned. “Well, it was a long day. Kiss me goodnight.”
He did.
She sighed and curled up at his side. He watched the lone star through the smoke hole and listened to the eerie calls of loons on the river. The peaceful sounds of the forest. He closed his eyes, and sleep took him immediately.
Chapter 76
Watery Glades
A stone axe wasn’t the ideal tool for shaping a round piece of fir log into an oar blade, and John’s steel knife was too small, so it was a slow and laborious job of hacking and whittling. When the oars were ready three days later, the oarlock problem stumped him for another day. He solved it by cutting a deep groove into the side of a short log to form a fulcrum. An oar would be slotted into it for rowing. To prevent an oar from being accidentally lost, it would be further secured by a leather strap.
Meanwhile, Liz stitched animal skins into a triangular sail. John supposed he’d have to make a rudder too, although they could use one of the oars for steering if they sailed under the wind.
Eventually, the day came when everything was ready. Instead of lugging the oars, chunky oarlocks, mast, sail, and three staves supporting the mast, they decided to bring the raft up the Fleet.
The morning sun shone in a cloudless sky of cerulean blue. Green walls of reeds towered above their heads, rustling in the wind. As usual, Liz had her canvas bag with a pot of embers. Little George bounced in the deerskin sling tied to John’s chest. John held his spear, and Liz carried her bow at the ready with an arrow nocked.
Without Spot to warn them of dangers, they had to skulk furtively through the reeds, pausing to sniff the air and listen. According to the wolf pack, no ursines had visited their patch of woods for some time, but they couldn’t rely on that sketchy intelligence.
After crossing the flood meadow fringed with swaying bulrushes, they entered a dense reed bed with John in the lead parting stalks with his spear. He glanced back at Liz, muttering. “Is this the right place?”
She held a finger to her lips and pointed to a deliberately broken reed cane, dry and yellow. A few paces away, there was another. John himself had marked the path.
He nodded and turned away to hide his embarrassment. He’d been relying on Spot so much that his own tracking abilities, which were rudimentary to start with, had atrophied completely.
As they made their way deeper into the thickets, something bulky thrashed in the reeds at their approach, splashing through the shallows. In his mind, John pictured a tiger getting ready to pounce on them. Up to his ankles in water, he crouched with the spear thrust in front of him, his heart trip-hammering in his chest.
Behind him, Liz pulled the string of her bow back.
George chose that moment to bawl. With him making so much noise, it was unclear whether the creature they had surprised in its hideout was attacking or escaping. For several seconds, they had a tense standoff.
When George made a pause in his crying, it became obvious that the animal was retreating, hissing and spitting angrily. John and Liz lowered their weapons.
“Shush, little one,” she said and turned to John, “It sounded huge. A tiger?”
“Sure.” He forced a laugh. “I’ve been wondering if baby’s cries have an evolutionary advantage. Now I know. They scare off wild beasts.”
“It’s the smell of smoke from live coals that scares them.”
He shrugged. “The bastard gave me a jump.”
George wailed for a while, but seeing that nobody paid him much attention, he calmed down.
They crossed an open boggy stretch where they cured animal skins in the peat, and up ahead lay the islet where they had left the reed boat. But the Ra was gone. John dashed forward with a curse—the tide must have torn the raft from its bindings and carried it off—but then he saw the upward-curving prow poking through the grass that had grown a foot taller in two weeks.
As the boat rested on lumps of driftwood, instead of lying on the damp ground, the reeds of the hull remained as good as new.
John dragged it to the water and launched it into the channel that at low tide was only ankle deep. Then they waited for the tide to rise. Liz stuffed tinder-dry reed fluff into the firepot and started a small fire on the shore while he bathed their baby in the shallows. Supported by John, George sat in the water, cooing and slapping the surface with his tiny pink hands.
John’s mind drifted back to all the times he’d bathed Emily and Ben when they were babies, but on this bright and sunny day the memory of them seemed less sharp, as if he looked at his past life through a semi-opaque glass. He glanced at Liz, wondering how often she thought of her lost family and their lost world. As she appeared so relaxed and content today, he imagined it would sadden her if he asked. Pushing the memories away, he ruffled George’s hair. Far safer to dwell in the present.
The acrid tang of smoke mingled with the cloying aroma of waterlilies, and the sun beat down on John’s bare head. Dragonflies darted over the still surface like miniature helicopters, bees droned, and iridescent blue damselflies flitted above the rippling marsh grasses. A green frog sat on a lily pad, blinking in the sunlight, waiting for flies and mosquitoes to come closer and serve themselves for its dinner.
A fair-sized perch, black-striped and red-finned, had become trapped by the receding tide in a puddle surrounded by oozing mud. After taking George to the shore and laying him in the grass, John took care of the fish.
In no time, it was sizzling over the flames. John and Liz sat in the grass, watching George play with his tiny toes. All three of them were naked, catching the last sun of the summer to top up their stores of vitamin-D for the coming winter.
Liz drizzled water over the fish to stop its skin from burning and laughed. “Imagine if our ex-colleagues saw us now. We look like nudists on a picnic.”
“We’d have to remove the stone axe and spear from view. And that roasting spit is too rustic.”
She chuckled and pulled her phone from his backpack. “I’m going to take a picture.” After propping the device against a driftwood log, she set the timer and hurried back. The phone clicked cheerfully. Liz said. “I’ll title it: A survivalist meets a nudist.”
He stretched on the glass, laughing. “Which of us is the survivalist and which a nudist?”
“Either or.”
Out of the corner of his eye, John watched George lying in the grass, reaching clumsily for damselflies that darted above. There was no risk of him crawling away. At two months old, he couldn’t even turn on his stomach, although he kept trying, rather ineffectively.
“The food’s ready,” Liz announced.
Eating his half of the bony fish, lost in reverie, John gazed at the surrounding swampland. On a day like this, it seemed that pain, cold, and hunger had no right to exist in the world, and their family could dwell among the reeds and bulrushes in perpetual bliss as if in the Garden of Eden. Of course, swarms of mosquitoes came out at night, and tigers lurked in the reeds at all hours. Aurochs too. But there was plenty of fish and waterfowl, and maybe the ursines wouldn’t find them here. Maybe. But maybe they would. He thought back to the previous winter when he needed to torch the rushes to stop the enemy from following them.
He broke a dry reed cane and threw it on the fire.
Liz must have been watching his face because she said, “It’s not that bad, you know.”
“And I thought I was the telepathic one.”
She chuckled but said nothing.
Silently, the tide arrived, and
rivulets slithered like transparent snakes over the black mud. Isolated puddles merged into shallow channels that gradually widened and deepened. The boat floated higher.
“Another half an hour, and all the channels will be full,” he said.
Liz waded into the shallows. “The water’s so clean. Let’s have a swim. All three of us. Babies younger than six months can hold their breath reflexively.”
“Okay.” John tied the boat to a projecting tree root, musing if in her previous life Liz had done baby swimming classes when her sons were little. He picked up George and slowly lowered him into the water. George seemed quite happy to wiggle underwater as if he were a baby seal. John pulled him out after ten seconds. “It looks scary. How long can he hold his breath?”
“Okay, let’s not overdo it.”
As the water continued to rise, they splashed about. After a while, John put George in the sun to dry off and warm up.
“Might as well have a wash myself while I can,” he said.
He ducked his head under the surface, rinsed his hair, then grabbed a handful of lush grass, mashed it, and lathered himself as if with a sponge. Greenish suds drifted away on the slow current. In his previous, civilized life, he’d had no need to know how to keep clean in the wild. He wondered how easily irrelevant knowledge became forgotten.
Liz would sometimes sing nursery rhymes to George about London Bridge falling down, or the Itsy-Bitsy Spider climbing up the waterspout, but the boy would never see a bridge or a waterspout.
He watched her soap her hair. She crouched, then ducked under. When she came up, her tresses floated around her naked shoulders like coppery ribbons. Her eyes gleamed with peaceful contentment.
She cocked her head to pour water out of her ear and glanced about. “I think the tide’s fully in. Let’s go.”
Chapter 77
Roving on the River
Liz put tiny George in his sling and helped John to tie the ends around his back. As they boarded the boat and cast off, they left the driftwood fire burning on the shore. With John pushing with the poling rod and Liz paddling, the boat glided swiftly down the twisting waterway. Soon their islet disappeared behind a turn in the channel. For a while, there was only silence and the gentle lapping of water. The wind whispered in the reeds, and the heady scent of water lilies filled the air. The mid-morning sun shone directly ahead.
As the towering walls of fecund green slid by, John sensed someone or something watching him. He peered into the swaying palisade of rustling stalks. No one.
“Liz, do you feel it?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “What?”
“A tiger.”
He sensed the watcher to the left, so he poled along the opposite shore of the channel. But with the passage being only fifteen feet wide, the boat began snagging waterlilies that crowded the shore. A tiger could leap across with ease. Its great weight would break the raft and pitch them overboard. John looked at his spear that lay on deck at his feet. A puny weapon. Of course, as long as they had fire in the pot . . .
As the boat left the narrow spot behind, the channel widened, and his sense of impending doom receded. He held up his poling rod, water dripping from one end, and listened. Silence.
He still sensed the killer lurking in the reeds and pointed. “The bastard’s right there.”
They traveled fifty yards farther, and the channel started curving to the north, toward the woods. Just before the danger area disappeared beyond the bend, reeds parted on the left bank of the narrow spot, and a camouflage-green tiger slunk out, its pitiless eyes studying them wistfully, hungrily.
John gripped his poling stick tighter. A shiver of dread slithered up his legs to the pit of his stomach.
Liz slid the bow off her shoulder and nocked an arrow. In one fluid motion, she pulled the string back, aimed, and let fly.
The tiger jerked as if hit by a high voltage charge. With a roar of outrage, it leaped straight up into the air. It landed in the water with a splash, a black-feathered shaft stuck in its flank. Compared to its huge body, the arrow looked tiny. The beast surged across the channel in two heartbeats and bounded into the reed bed on the right side, bellowing.
As its roars receded into the distance, Liz said, “That should teach him not to sneak around people.”
“That was a very good shot.”
Liz shook her head, her hair flying wildly. “Not good enough. The bastard’s still moving.”
“You’d need a ballista to drop him.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “You battered one of them to death with a rock.”
“You’re flattering me, Liz. He was already dying of a heart attack.”
Far in the distance, the tiger bellows continued, but their timbre changed from outrage to pain.
“You sensed him, didn’t you?” Liz asked.
“Yeah.”
“That was handy. That’s magic, you know.”
“Your shooting is magic.”
She sighed, but her eyes danced. “Are we going to sweet-talk each other or sail this boat?”
He pushed off with the pole, grinning.
The mouth of the Fleet lay just ahead. With the tide still rising and counteracting the current, they swept upstream with ease and moored the boat next to the pile of rigging they had left on the bank.
It took them little time to attach the oarlocks to the sides of the boat by tying them to the thwarts with leather thongs. Hoisting and securing the mast took more effort. But they had already prepared support poles arranged in a pyramidal structure to prop up the mast. All they had to do was tie the base of the mast and the poles to the structural timbers of the deck.
A horizontal boom was secured low down on the mast. After lashing the bottom edge of the triangular sail to the boom, John and Liz tied the top corner of the sail to a strong rope of twisted leather strips. Then John threaded this rope through the greased hole in the wooden block at the top of the mast.
After replenishing the burning coals in the pot and loading provisions, they cast off again.
As they needed to see how the Ra handled in open water, they decided to head for the main arm of the river and to keep away from the sheltered side branches.
“The wind’s coming from the east,” Liz said as they left the mouth of the Fleet and drifted down a wide strait between two reed beds. “Ready to test the sail?”
“Let’s try the oars first and get into a clear channel.”
“Okay.”
He sat down in the middle of the deck, behind the mast, the boom with its sail pushed off to one side, braced his feet against a thwart, and picked up the oars. He’d tested the oarlocks on dry land, and everything had worked fine. But would it work on the river?
The oar blades dipped into the water, and he pulled on the oars, pushing his feet against the thwart and leaning back. The Ra surged forward. He plunged the oars in the water again and repeated the maneuver. He’d prudently shaped the oarlock grooves and the oars themselves in such a way that the oars stayed straight without twisting. It had worked on dry land, and now it worked on the river.
He rowed steadily, bending and unbending his back, as the mouth of the Fleet receded behind them. In his sling, little George gazed about with interest.
From the stern, Liz grinned widely. “Wow, that’s fast.” She stood. “Let me try.”
They swapped places, and she rowed for a while. Their boat—technically a raft—was wide enough for them to sit side by side, each pulling one oar, so they tried that too. They left the reed beds behind, entering the main channel, and turned west, upriver.
“And now the sail,” Liz cried.
“Righto!”
He untied one oar and fit it to a short log fixed to the stern. This log had a deep narrow groove cut into it—same as the oarlocks. The handle of the oar became a tiller, its blade a rudder.
Together, they pulled on the sail rope and hoisted the sail. He tied the rope to a cleat at the base of the mast. Liz worked the tiller to
turn the boat downwind. Ponderously, the stiff leather sail filled with wind, and the boom swung right, stopping against a slanting stave supporting the mast. Even though the heavy sail was rather too small for the size of the craft, and the breeze was gentle, the Ra moved along at a fair speed.
Presently, the tide was in—neither rising nor ebbing. Water churned as the current fought against the intrusion of the tide, but that agitation didn’t affect the boat.
“It’s working,” he said.
“It sure is.”
“Let’s see how she sails transverse to the wind,” John said.
Liz pushed the rudder hard to port, and the bow turned south toward the distant opposite shore. The boat held its course and the forested hills of the south bank acquired sharper definition as they drew nearer. “You want to hold the tiller?”
“Sure.”
John sat down on the reed deck at the stern and took the tiller from her. Suspended in his sling, George caught his parents’ excitement and started cooing.
Liz made her way to the bow. She held to a slanting pole connecting the mast to the prow. After a while she said, “At this speed we’ll reach the south bank in an hour. Move the rudder more to the left. See if she tacks against the wind.”
“It’s not left but port,” he said, turning the tiller more. “And right is starboard.”
“That’s in the Old World. Here we’re free to dispense with the nautical terms.”
The boat turned southeast, but while it was still moving south, it drifted heavily westward with the wind.
He said, “We need a keel to tack against the wind.”
His gaze fell on the hand paddles lying by the mast. After they’d installed oars, the short paddles were of limited use. John pushed the paddle blades between the reed sheaves that made up the deck, thus creating two retractable keels—one fore and another aft. The westward drift was cut to nearly nothing.
He gazed at Liz proudly. “Who said I’m no good at mechanical things?”
“Your mother?” Liz laughed. “But let’s go upstream and see if we can find that little island again.”