Ted Dekker - Outlaw

Movement in the compound stalled save for the rushing of warriors along the fence. Kirutu stepped back, touched his ribs, and slowly lifted a bloody hand.

His eyes lifted to meet Stephen’s, and he stepped forward to show his body. Pierced and bleeding, but the wound was only superficial.

“For this you will burn alive with your mother!” Kirutu’s vitriolic voice carried over the warriors’ cries.

He extended his bloodied hand toward Stephen, fingers spread wide and trembling.

“Take him!”

A thousand warriors had entered Kirutu’s sanctum and formed a broad ring around the entire field. With a roar that overpowered the shrieking sky, they surged forward, closing in on Stephen like a massive constricting snake.

He did not calculate. He did not think. He did not embrace his survival instinct as much as become it. His mind collapsed in on itself and he found identity only in survival.

To this end, speed and momentum would be his only advantage. If he could not escape the compound, both he and his mother would be burned.

They would expect him to run. He stood still.

They would expect him to rush them as he had before. He took a knee. And he waited.

His body was trembling, he could feel it in his fingers as he planted one palm on the earth, readying himself. Fear crashed through his mind like a thundering boar. He couldn’t escape it.

So he used it, tensed and coiled.

You will burn alive , Kirutu had said. If not for that cry, they might have sent a thousand arrows into his body.

The warriors on the leading edge were covered in sweat that beaded on their oiled bodies. Stephen fixed his gaze beyond them on those who trailed, ten deep.

He didn’t think of them as armed men, but as a thick veil of evil that he had to escape if he was to save his mother.

Twenty paces, and still he didn’t move.

Fifteen, and he dug his fingers into the earth and shifted his weight to give himself maximum leverage.

Ten, and they began to pull up, their prey at their feet, captivity now assured.

Five, and Stephen launched himself.

His movement was again so sudden that he’d taken three full strides and was already in a full sprint before any could react.

An ax was arcing toward him when he reached the line, but he managed to slow its drive with his right forearm. The ax head glanced off his shoulder, leaving a bloody gash.

Then he was past the warrior and crashing through a gauntlet of bunched, sweating bodies. Their spears were useless in such tight formation. Some swung their axes, but there was too much flesh in close quarters for any weapon to effectively find his body.

Fifteen battering strides and Stephen slammed past the last of them, sending a smaller man flying onto his back. Blood flowed from his shoulder, but his body was fueled with enough adrenaline to suppress any pain.

He sprinted across the open field, knowing that spears and arrows could still reach him. He veered to his left, away from the back gate, which still accepted a steady stream of warriors. He struck for a vacant section along the wooden fence, fifty paces distant.

All that mattered now was reaching that barrier.

He shut down his hearing and paid no mind to the pursuit.

They were coming after him, a herd terrified of failure. He could feel the ground shaking under him. Arrows sailed past; a spear clipped his right elbow.

None of this mattered. Only the fence.

Twenty meters.

He adjusted his approach and angled for a sapling that grew along the enclosure.

Ten meters.

Stephen left the ground at five paces, planted one foot on the tree’s supple trunk five feet above the ground, and used the sapling’s recoil to spring him higher. His progress catapulted him to the fence’s crossbeam—barely.

He crashed into it, threw his body into a forward roll, and toppled over the fence.

Stephen landed on his feet in a crouch, facing a single terrified warrior next to a hut. He wasn’t sure where his next impulse came from, and he felt no need to temper it.

He closed the distance to the warrior in two even strides and shoved his palm up into the man’s jaw with enough force to shatter his teeth and crack his skull.

And then he was running through the village for the jungle.

Chapter Twenty-nine

THE WARIK’S pursuit pushed Stephen deep into the jungle. They posed no real threat to him once he cleared the village. No one could hope to catch him in the trees.

They posed no threat, but their madness had overwhelmed him. He knew this, but he seemed powerless to change it. The peace he’d guarded so closely as he’d entered their village had fled. He was now host to a barrage of emotions no longer abiding in the peace of his Father. Chief among them: a terrible fear that he’d condemned his mother to a funeral pyre.

With that fear came a sickening sense of loss and abandonment. The only person in the world who was flesh of his flesh—the mother who’d brought him to life and sacrificed peace for his sake—suffered in the heart of the Warik village without hope.

Nothing mattered now more than rescuing her. If required he would kill a thousand Warik to save her. The impulse pounded through his skull. She was hopelessly lost without him. He owed her his life.

He rushed through the jungle and doubled around, searching for higher ground. Within the hour he reached a knoll that offered him a clear view of the valley.

He peered down at the village, panting and drenched with sweat. From his vantage he could see the full scope of their resolve. Five thousand warriors had found their way into Kirutu’s compound now and flowed like a river around the towering structure that held his mother.

Another five thousand ran back and forth just outside the main gates that led into the fenced village. There was no way into the stronghold. And if by some impossible means he did manage to reach his mother, ten thousand strong would smother them both.

He too, then, was held captive. He too was in the heart of darkness, lost and trembling. He could feel her desperation—layers of it, thick like so much black mud deposited over so many years. How she’d endured it he could not fathom, but she’d somehow clung to life, fed by dreams of being rescued by him. Dreams that were now failing her. She was too weak. It had been too much.

And he would fail.

Stephen sank to his knees, limp and powerless.

He tried to still his mind, but new voices had taken up residence, whispering pain and anguish, his mother’s and his own. His mother had brought him to this distant world knowing the danger, subjecting him to isolation from the rest of his kind. Now he was left to live his life in this jungle alone?

There would be no home among the Warik. He couldn’t live on a mountain his whole life. He needed companionship, the kind he’d been allowed to feel with Lela, if only for a day.

The memory of Kirutu slashing his blade across her neck sliced through his mind.

Every bone in his body demanded he rush down the mountain to save his mother. To reclaim Lela. Both were impossibilities. They were dead and doomed already and he was alone.

Abandoned.

He would rather be dead. And now he saw that Kirutu was right: he was dead already, with his mother in her grave.

He was falling apart and he didn’t seem to be able to find a way clear of his desperation. Tears filled his eyes as he stared down at the sea of pulsing flesh.

He had to find Shaka. There was no other way. He had to return to the mountain and fall at Shaka’s feet and beg his teacher to show him a way he could save his mother. And in saving his mother, save himself from this pain, because he was her son, born of her flesh, one.

Stephen staggered to his feet, turned his back on the Tulim valley, and ran.