Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

The breeze shifted and carried the scent of the humans to the drinking sabertooth. It raised its head, stared directly at them with yellow eyes and snarled, exuding the studied restraint of a creature in complete command of an awkward situation. Felice met its gaze.

The others were immobile with horror, waiting for the cat to spring into the water. But it did no such thing. Its belly was full and its cubs were waiting, and Felice’s mind stroked its feline vanity and told it that the scrawny prey crouching on the rocks was scarcely worth a ducking. So the machairodus lapped and glared at them and wrinkled the bridge of its nose in a contemptuous one-sided snort, and at last withdrew into the undergrowth.

“It will take me five minutes,” Amerie whispered, “to offer a Mass of Thanksgiving. And long overdue.”

Felice shook her head with an enigmatic smile and Richard turned away looking superior, but Claude came to Amerie’s rock and snared the gold thimble of wine and the flake of dried bread from the Mass kit she carried in the pocket of Richard’s uniform. And when that was over they went on their way again, chopping a path on the bank opposite from that claimed by the sabertooth.

“It was so incredibly beautiful,” the nun said to Claude. “But why does it need those teeth? The big cats of our time got along nicely with shorter ones.”

“Our lions and tigers didn’t try to kill elephants.”

Richard exclaimed, “You mean those monstrous hoe-tuskers they tried to frighten us with in the auberge Tri-D’s? Here?”

“More likely the smaller mastodons in these uplands. Gomphothcrium angustidens is probably the common sort. Hardly half the size of those rhinos we dodged yesterday. We won’t run into deinotherium until we have to cross a swamp or a large river bottomland.”

“Kaleidoscopic,” the pirate growled. “Pardon me for asking, but do any of you aces have a destination in mind? Or are we just running?”

Claude said softly, “We’re just running. When we’ve shaken off the soldiers and the bear-dogs, then there’ll be time enough to make strategic decisions. Or don’t you agree, son?”

“Aw, shit,” said Richard, and began hacking at the stream-side shrubbery once more.

At last the brook merged with a large turbulent river flowing in a southerly direction. Claude thought it might be the upper Saône. “We won’t follow this river,” he told the rest of the Group. “It probably curves around to the southwest and empties into the lake forty or fifty kloms downstream. We’ll have to cross over, and that means the decamole bridges.”

Each Survival Unit was equipped with three bridge sections that could be married to produce a narrow, self-supporting span twenty meters in length that resembled a ladder with close-set rungs. Moving up the river to a point where the torrent narrowed between two craggy shelves of rock, they inflated and ballasted the sections, joined them, and swung the bridge over to the opposite bank.

“Looks kinda flimsy,” Richard remarked uneasily. “Funny, when we practiced with it back at the auberge it seemed a lot wider.”

The bridge was a good third of a meter in width and steady as a rock. However, they had used it to cross a still pond in the auberge’s cavern, while here surging rapids and sharp rocks awaited below.

“We could inflate another bridge and lash the two side by side if it would make you feel safer,” Amerie suggested But the pirate bristled indignantly at the suggestion, hoisted his pack, and lurched across like an apprentice tightrope walker.

“You next, Amerie,” said Claude.

The nun stepped confidently onto the span. How many hundreds of logs had she walked over, crossing the mountain streams of the Oregon Cascades? The bridge rungs were less than a handspan apart, impossible to fall through. All that was necessary was a firm step, balanced posture, and keep the eyes on the opposite bank and not on the foaming chute six meters below.

Her right thigh muscle went into spasm. She teetered, caught herself, then overbalanced on the opposite side and went feet-first into the river.

“Dump your pack!” Felice screamed. Moving so fast that her hands were blurred, she dropped the bow and arrows, unfastened her own backpack, slapped the quick-release buckles of her cuirass and greaves, and jumped in after Amerie.

Richard gaped from the other side, but the old man ran back the way they had come, to the relative calm of the smaller stream’s outspate. Two heads bobbed in the rapids. The leading one fetched momentarily against a humpbacked boulder and disappeared. The second one swept up to the rock and also went under, but after a long minute both women reappeared and floated toward Claude. He seized a stout piece of driftwood and held it out. Felice caught hold with one hand and he was able to pull her in. Her other hand had the fingers entwined in Amerie’s hair.

Claude waded out and dragged the nun onto the bank. Felice rested on hands and knees in the shallows, spewing and coughing. He lifted Amerie’s sodden body in a jackknife bend to empty the lungs of water, then filled them with his own warm air.

Breathe, child, he begged her. Live, daughter.

There was a sound of gagging, a first halting expansion of the chest beneath the soaked and torn starship captain’s uniform. One last kiss of shared breath, and she returned.

Amerie’s eyes opened and she stared wildly at Claude, then at the smiling Felice. A choked sob rose in her throat and she buried her head in the old man’s breast. He had Felice pull the warm Orcadian sweater from his pack and wrapped the nun in it; but when he tried to pick Amerie up and carry her across the bridge she was much too heavy for him. So it was the little athlete who had to assist the nun, while the paleontologist toted his own and Felice’s gear.

Amerie’s pack with its medical supplies was lost, swept far downstream! They had to set her broken arm with the meager first-aid equipment from the individual Survival Units, following steps outlined in a laconic plaque entitled Common Medical Emergencies . The injury was a simple fracture of the left humerus, easily reduced even by amateur medics; but by the time Amerie was treated and sedated, the afternoon was well advanced. Richard convinced Claude and Felice that it would be useless to try to press on farther, regardless of possible pursuit. They went a short distance from the river into a concealing grove of massive oaks. There Richard erected two decamole cabins while Felice went out and shot a big fat roebuck and Claude grubbed nourishing cattail tubers from a boggy spot.

With their stomachs full, cots set on maximum soft, and critter-proof screendoors latched, they fell asleep even before night fell. They never heard the owls and nightingales and tree-frogs singing, nor the fading howls of bear-dogs raging on a cold and futile trail far to the south. They did not see the mist start to rise from the rapids as the stars brightened. And they never saw the glowing grotesqueries of the Firvulag, who came and danced on the opposite bank of the river until the stars paled with the coming of dawn.

The following morning Amerie was feverish and weak. By common consent they dosed her with their limited store of medication, made her comfortable in one hut, and withdrew to the other so that she could sleep and mend. They all stood in need of recuperation, and there seemed little danger that any pursuit party could cross the crag-bordered torrent without their being aware of it. Felice was confident that they had eluded the trackers altogether. “They might even find equipment from Amerie’s pack downstream and decide that we’ve drowned in the river.”

So they slept, lunched on cold venison and algiprote, and then sat in the shade of an ancient oak, sipping small cups of precious instant coffee and trying to decide what to do next.