Dennis McKiernan - Once upon a Summer Day

“Rapids?” Grimacing in pain, Borel stood and peered downstream.

The river narrowed and the banks grew higher and the current grew swifter, and from ’round a turn in the flow he now could hear a distant roar. Even as he hobbled aft, Borel glanced at the single undamaged arrow he had left, and then the line, and shook his head; rope was entirely too weighty for an arrow to bear; besides, the nearest shore was yet some hundred or so paces away, and any trees still farther. Taking up the sweep, he pulled for the closest bank. The rear of the float swung sideways.

Borel stepped to the front sweep and again hauled for the shore. The raft swung about once more, this time opposite, though it did not come closer to land for, with a fore and aft sweep, it was meant to be steered by two oars-men, who, pulling together, could have reached either bank at will.

Using the sweep, Borel stopped the slow-turning spin and oriented the float so that one end was aimed toward the shore, the banks ever steepening, and then he used the sweep in a fishtailing fashion as a sculling oar. But the raft was ponderous and progress slow; surely it would not reach land in time.

Borel took up one of the poles and thrust against the deep bottom, but the shaft went in nigh its full length, and he got little purchase, and the ever-swiftening current now had the raft in its grip, and Borel’s efforts proved futile.

’Round the bend they went and, ahead between rising walls, Borel could see rapids falling away, their end beyond seeing past a distant turn, the roaring white water crashing among and over great boulders.

“Ah, Mithras,” he groaned, “more rocks.”

He took up his bow and slung it across his back by its carrying thong, and then he looped his quiver over his head and across one shoulder.

“Lord Borel, what will you do?” cried Flic above the oncoming roar.

“There’s nought I can do but ride it out,” shouted Borel.

“Oh, if you could only fly,” cried Flic, hovering, Buzzer orbiting.

“Indeed,” muttered Borel, and he grabbed the aft sweep stanchion and held on tightly as the raft plunged into the thundering rage.

Down the long slope hurled the river to roar and shout and rend the air with the thunder of water storming apace, as it crested and rolled and broke over hidden barriers and smashed around great rocks to leap and fall crashing, only to hurtle into the next barrier and the next and the next. And amid the crests and troughs and rolling swells came the raft, lurching this way and that as it smashed into rocks and spun about, completely ensnared in fury. “Look out! Look out! Oh, my lord, look out!” cried Flic, flying above and followed by Buzzer, though Borel, clinging tightly and thoroughly drenched, heard nought but the bellow of a river run amok as the craft pumped and smashed over roiling, roaring billows; yet e’en had he heard the cries of the Sprite there was nothing Borel could do. Again and again the raft leapt up, to pause, and then to plummet back to the water; and Borel was jolted and jarred each time the timbers smacked down or crashed into or over a rock. Time after time Borel was knocked to his knees, but he held on tightly to the stanchion and lifted himself up before the next massive hammering crash. And the foaming river water funneled this way and that through gaps amid the great rocks and whelmed the float into jut and boulder and slab, and it began to disintegrate, as one after another the slender thwartwise struts broke in twain, and the logs began to separate.

The turning, pitching, fragmenting craft bucked and plunged and bashed downriver, the outermost logs breaking away, the innermost ones separating… and then the bulk of the raft smashed into a great midstream crag and pitched Borel off and into the chaos, the furious water tumbling him this way and that and hammering him into rock and stone and down into gravel and then hurling him back up through the water again to toss him into the air, only to reach up and drag him down and plunge him under once more, great logs and shattered timbers tumbling before and after.

Hacking, coughing, spewing water, Borel crawled out from a great, wide eddy pool to collapse ashore amid rounded river rocks a furlong or so below the last of the rapids.

Battered and bruised, he lay there panting, completely ignoring Flic’s entreaties of, “Are you all right, my lord?” and “I thought you drowned, my lord,” and “Is anything broken, my lord?”-the Sprite fretfully flitting about and hovering momentarily only to begin flitting about again.

Buzzer, on the other hand, said nothing, but puttered among the nearby flowers ashore as she gathered nectar and pollen.

Finally, Borel groaned and rolled over and stared at the sky.

“My lord…?” said Flic, now alighting on a broad blade of a single cattail reed standing alone amid the river pebbles along the shore.

“I think I would have been better off to have been spitted, roasted, and consumed,” said the prince at last.

“Oh, my lord, certainly not,” said Flic.

Bracing himself against the pain, Borel sat up, sucking in air through clenched teeth. He turned to the Sprite. “Flic, within the last candlemark or so, I have been shackled in a prison, been poked and prodded by Redcap Goblins, fought my way free just in time to fall down the face of a cliff to nearly be buried by a rock slide and almost be slain by a runaway grapnel that then jerked me off my feet and dragged me through even more rocks; I have been chased by Trolls and barely escaped only to be slammed into boulders by an angry river and all but drowned. So, when I say that I would have been better off had I been-Ah, zut! My long-knife. It’s gone.”

Flic looked at the empty scabbard yet strapped to Borel’s right thigh, then said, “But you still have your bow.”

Borel hauled the weapon ’round and examined it. It was undamaged. Next he upended his quiver. Nothing came out but water, his last arrow and the remains of the broken ones gone, swallowed by the rapids.

“And your hat,” added the Sprite, pointing at the shallows, where, caught in the eddy, the tricorn, half-submerged, slowly circled.

Groaning, Borel painfully stood, then, cursing at the river, hobbled out into the wide swirl and fetched the sodden hat. Water streaming, he slapped it onto his head. Flic began giggling, and Borel smiled, then winced, for his right cheek was bruised.

Clk! Clk! Borel, unclothed, sat by the fire and struck a stone against a shard of flint, shaping a primitive knife. His damp leathers and cloak and silks-shirt and undertrews and socks and linens-now nearly dry, hung on nearby shrubs, and his boots sat at hand.

Perched on a twig of one the shrubs, Flic nibbled on a grain of pollen.

Chk! Clak!

“Tomorrow, Flic, I would have you and Buzzer find a flower called ‘viburnum.’ Its blossoms come in small white clusters and-”

“I know viburnums, Prince Borel,” said Flic, sighing and rolling his eyes and silently appealing to Buzzer, the bee turning about on a nearby leaf to settle down for the evening. “After all, I am a Field Sprite.”

Borel grunted, and- Clk! Tkk! — continued to knap flakes from the flint.

With Flic’s help, the prince had found an outcropping of the stone, and had collected some pieces and then had made camp nearby. Using the carrying thong of his bow and the bow itself and a slightly hollowed rock cupped in his hand to steady a straight stick, he had spun the point of the wood against a piece of dry bark laden with dead grass to start a fire in a ring of stone on a wide patch of bare ground he had cleared. Nursing a glow into a small flame and carefully feeding the tiny blaze with more grass and then dried twigs and finally dead branches, he at last had a campfire. He had then used the very same carrying thong to set a clover-baited snare on the trace of a trail at the edge of the woods a distance away. Returning to the fire, he had doffed his togs and draped them on nearby bushes, and had then taken up a suitable knapping rock and had begun shaping one of the larger fragments of flint into a primitive but sharp-edged stone knife. And while he was setting the fire and doffing his clothes and had begun chipping flint, Flic and Buzzer had flown back upstream to see if the remaining Troll and Goblins were following; they were not. Flic and Buzzer had returned and the noontide had turned to midafternoon, and it in turn had drifted into evening.