checking on their progress. Doggedly they traipsed and trudged along the base of the crevice, the fissure becoming ominously deeper and the sky frighteningly smaller. Alex was in the lead only ten feet in front of Jamie, but Jamie could barely see him in the pale light from above that drifted stingily below, seeming to stop falling altogether halfway down into the slender ravine.
Alex stopped. “Wet’s west.” They sat in the dirt, breathing laboredly and peering up at the slice of sky far above them. When their heavy breathing had subsided and Jamie was about to suggest that they should go back to find a way to the surface, taking their chances at that juncture by simply running across the battlefield, Alex remarked, “Jamie, I hew something!”
“What?” Jamie asked, alarmed.
“The wivuh, Jamie! I think I hew the wivuh!” Alex exclaimed quietly, and added, pointing ahead in the near-total darkness, “and I think it’s coming fwom oveh thew!”
“Yes, Alex, I think you’re right! It would make sense after all this time—let’s only hope there’ll be a place to climb out of here!”
Dripping with sweat, hungry, and with a gnawing thirst made more acute by the sound of flowing water, Alex and Jamie struggled to their feet and scrambled with stiff and sore limbs toward the sound, modestly hopeful and intensely wishful for something—anything, even remotely—promising.
For another thirty minutes, though, they trudged toward the sound of the water, wrestling with increasingly muddy dirt that became knee-deep sludge sucking at their feet. Each fell multiple times, becoming slathered in mud. A faint light appeared in the distance, illuminating what appeared to be a hole in the wall of the crevice off to the right, just ahead. As they approached the rather small, dark circle of an opening, they heard a high-pitched chattering sound, as of dozens of miniature people conversing excitedly. Alex tapped Jamie on the shoulder and gestured with a finger for quiet. They stopped, attempting to understand the words, and then proceeded cautiously, hoping to pass the hole without being noticed.
But it was too late to hide their presence. The pitch of the sounds grew higher and louder, and seemed to be approaching them as the boys neared the hole. They stopped just short of the opening and peered into it. Alex stood up with a jolt, falling into Jamie. “Wats! Thew ah wats, Jamie!”
Indeed, a large rat that had been standing on its two hind legs just in front of Alex’s nose dropped to the ground and raced back into the hole—toward a dense pack of salivating rodents already agitated, awaiting a signal to attack. Alex and Jamie jumped past the hole and struggled feverishly in the mud tugging at their feet toward the dim light in the distance. As they neared the source of the light, they heard the racing waters of the river just ahead—and the scrambling of squealing bodies just behind them, swirling about the mouth of the hole and whipping themselves into a frenzy for an all-out assault.
The boys made a sharp left turn and stopped at the river’s edge; above them was a ceiling of rock covering the water, as if the river was running at that point underground. But the earth during the quake had shifted markedly where they now stood, forcing a large sheet of stone to slide over the top of the river basin. It was entirely dark off to the right, but daylight again was only fifteen feet beyond the overhang to their left. To get there, however, they would have to jump a long way down into the muddy, churning water, the depth of which was impossible to know without leaping.
Without hesitating, Alex said, “Come on! Wet’s go!”
But Jamie stood frozen in place, staring less at the roiling river than at the envisioned memory of a barely missed appointment with death in a river in Riven Valley that he did not want now to revisit.
“Jamie!” screamed Alex. “We have to jump!”
“Alex—I, I can’t!”
Alex was about to repeat the urgent command when, upon hearing the rats suddenly advancing, he grabbed Jamie by his sleeve and pulled him over the edge. They plunged beneath the surface of the troubled water, only to resurface moments later well downstream, coughing and spluttering in the daylight. Alex, still holding onto Jamie, looked back and saw dozens of rats, poised above the water where only seconds earlier the two of them had stood. Jamie recalled hearing that cats had nine lives; he now wondered how many Alex and he had, and how many had already been used up.
They bobbed and rolled swiftly down the river, each hanging onto the other and without speaking, other than to give alerts, such as, “Jamie! A wock!” or “Alex! Push off!” or “Look out!” or “Going under!”
The water was surprisingly warm, and currents billowing up from below seemed to hold them aloft without their having to swim or even try to float. They traveled in this fashion for nearly an hour, searching the banks far ahead for a place to land; but everywhere they looked the banks were either too steep or entirely nonexistent—and they were moving too swiftly to take advantage of any shallow ones that might come along. The river flowed on for miles in a ravine carved thirty feet into the earth, so Alex and Jamie had no idea what any of the landscape outside the riverbed looked like along the way.
Finally, the river began to slow markedly, branching on both sides into a number of smaller streams and creeks, and thick stands of trees along the banks above them leaned over the water, turning twilight to dusk. The riverbed rose. Soon the banks were nearly level with the water, and Alex and Jamie found themselves floating gently through a dense forest, able to touch bottom and head for land at will along navigable shorelines. Since they were making progress toward someplace, however, and the ride was pleasant, they decided to wait for a while before beaching themselves. Occasionally a blackbird would give out a raspy chirp and flit rapidly from view. Otherwise, Alex and Jamie saw no other signs of life except the trees—the highest branches of which began to swirl wildly in a suddenly-freshening wind; the tree limbs squeaked and groaned as if conspiring with one another.
Soon, however, the trees thinned and the wind turned feathery, barely stirring the topmost branches.
A short while later the riverbed deepened once again and the trees soon disappeared, or at least disappeared from view. Everything all about them was again still.
“Wook, Jamie!” Alex whispered, pointing straight up. “What ah they, Jamie?” Jamie looked up and saw perhaps a half dozen spots, as if hovering in a pack, high in the sky, nearly to the clouds.
“I don’t know, Alex, but I’m thinking we should stay as still as possible—and try not to be seen.”
As they floated without stirring in a lazy current, they heard in the stillness only the sound of the water gently lapping the shores. The spots circled high overhead for a short while and then slowly dispersed out of sight.
It was just then, however, that the most startling of sounds shattered the stillness.
~six~
Aneht, with Elli in hand on one side and Beatríz in hand on the other, stepped out of a sharp right turn in the middle of the Sanctuary forest and stopped. Only a few feet in front of them stood what appeared to be a mud hut the shape and size of a large igloo, with a single arched doorway opened wide to the dense darkness within. The hut was a perfectly rounded, hemi-spherical dome, it’s earthen surface hard and smooth.
“Yes, yes, well here we are! Inside you’ll have mud pies of all sorts to suit any fancy!” Aneht giggled with girlish delight. “Yes, yes!”
Elli, who along with Beatríz was trying hard not to believe that Aneht was shortly going to be serving them anything other than actual pies—as in, for instance, something like a
