The Far Wild

44 - We're Missing Someone

* * *

Theo

True to her word, the grumpy old spinster Elpida had us sleeping in the canoes. Though, despite the discomfort, I had to admit it really wasn’t a bad idea. As a soldier, thinking of making camp in a defensible location was something I’d been trained for. Sleeping in the river wouldn’t be a great idea against most enemies, but when the enemy was terror birds and other predators, well, it worked. All it’d taken had been a few knots and some clever lashings and our canoes were suspended in the middle of the river.

My canoe, now occupied by Suni, the loudmouthed Senesio, and the cowering prisoner, Agostos, was tied off on the stern end to a tree on the east bank. The bow was secured by a short length of rope to the second canoe, which contained Elpida, Gabar, Demetrias, and Maritza, and was tied off at its stern to a tree on the west bank. There wasn’t much of a current, so as long as the ropes held steady, our makeshift floating beds would stay in the center of the river, a good twenty paces from either shore.

My watch was almost over—if the moon above was any indication—and the rain had slowed such that it teased with the possibility of stopping entirely. In just a bit longer I’d be able to pass off guard duty to Senesio, then cram down into the bottom of the canoe and try to get some shut-eye. With luck, I might even be able to keep the rain off of my face.

The faint, ghostly light of the moon certainly wasn’t helping to keep me awake. I’d pulled my share of night watches in the emperor’s army, but those hadn’t been after days on days of running for my life. Those had held the promise of a hot meal and something approaching a comfortable bed afterward. Tonight held only the promise of a nap in the slightly flooded bottom of the canoe. But I was still breathing and that was all that mattered. So many others already weren’t that lucky.

Others like the sergeant. Ancestors above, but that hurt. How many years had I served under him now? Three. And on at least that many different continents. All for his story to end here. In some pathetic backwater on the edge of the world. After all his distinguished service, all his medals, all the generosity he’d shown to his soldiers, it was a right twisted situation. But it also wasn’t one I could dwell on. No, I needed to focus on getting everyone else out alive. That’s what the sergeant would have done.

I sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slow. For the moment, we were safe. Or as safe as we could be in this ancestors-cursed place. All around, the sounds of the night droned through the hiss of light rain. Crickets from the far banks, chirping in their constant rhythm. Soft, soft, loud. Soft, soft, loud. Their song repeated without end. Soft, soft, loud.

Then there were the toads. Croaking and bellowing as they called out to mates, or whatever it was toads called out to. Every so often one would cease its song and plop into the water to swim after some unseen bug.

There were other sounds too. Sounds I couldn’t recognize. Probably animals that were unique to the far wild. And hopefully, the kind that weren’t predators, though there was no way to tell.

Best to just tune it all out, then. Under any other circumstances, I might have found the chorus of night life fascinating. Beautiful, even. But not here. Not now. I took another long breath and let my eyes drift down to the water. At least there weren’t any terror birds in there.

There was a face, though. Staring up at me with tiny black eyes.

“Gah!” I shouted, falling back away from the edge of the canoe.

“What’s wrong?” Elpida, on watch in the other canoe, whipped toward me.

“In—in the water,” I said, breath coming quick. “I saw a face.”

“A face?” Elpida looked doubtful, but her eyes turned toward the water. “What sort of face?”

“The face kind of face!” I huffed, then edged back toward the lip of the canoe. I leaned forward slowly, holding my breath as I checked if the thing was still there.

It was.

Ancestors above, it was.

Just below the surface, not even an arm’s length away, something was staring up at me. Something with a bottle-nosed snout and an expression too close to a smile.

A dolphin, I realized. Except, unlike any dolphin I’d ever seen, the thing’s head seemed to sit on its neck just like a human’s. The forehead protruded in a large, bowl-shaped bump and, maybe it was a trick of the light, but the thing’s skin looked to be a faint pink.

It clacked its long snout twice beneath the surface, then spun to swim deeper. Its wide tail sent water flying, then slipped away with it, disappearing into the brown depths.

“Oh!” Elpida chuckled from the other canoe. “That’s a boto. A river dolphin. Weird beasties, they are. Do this thing with their neck where they spin their heads near all the way around. Like a big, aquatic owl.”

I frowned and double checked the thing hadn’t come back to stare at me some more.

“They’re harmless,” Elpida continued, probably seeing my concern. “Or, well, harmless as anything is out here. They don’t eat people, at least.”

“No, they just swim up out of the dark and scare the piss out of them.” Though, all things considered, that was better than the alternative.

Upriver, something splashed in the water and I snapped toward the noise. More splashes, then even more. Squinting, I could just make out a school of silver fish jumping out of the water, rushing toward us in a frenzy.

“A bait run,” I said, recognizing the phenomenon. Before my soldiering days I’d made a hobby of fishing. Beneath the surface, the dolphins were herding the fish all in one direction—a direction where the rest of the pod would be waiting to snap them up.

“Well that’s just unlucky,” Elpida said. “Hold on to something!”

“They’re just bait fish!” I laughed at the guidemaster. Maybe she knew the far wild, but she sure didn’t know the water.

“It’s not the fish I’m worried about,” Elpida shouted back, then ducked down low in her canoe.

“Oh.” I turned back toward the approaching wave of splashing fish. A dolphin exploded out from beneath them, soaring into the air and snapping at several flailing fish in the process. It slammed back to the water with a resounding splash that sent waves slapping against the side of the canoes.

“I’ve had enough of this place,” I growled, then ducked down in the canoe, forcing my head low as the splashing wave reached us.

Water rained down on my shoulders and neck as the fish passed. Then something—a dolphin probably—rammed into the canoe from below. The boat jerked to one side, then back again as another thud echoed through it. A big splash burst from the water right beside me and I just caught a glance of slick, pink skin flashing through the air before it splashed down out of sight.

“What in the hell?” Gabar’s voice called out. I peeked over the edge of the canoe to see him sitting up, eyes still bleary as he took in the commotion.

“Stay down—” Elpida began, but was cut off as a dolphin came flying through the air chasing several jumping fish. She ducked; Gabar didn’t. The roughly man-sized boto slammed into his shoulder as it flew past. The blow knocked him sideways, then toppled him over as his weight hit the side of the canoe. The rope tying the boat to shore pulled taut, stopping it from drifting in any direction, but it couldn’t stop it from flipping. Gabar’s falling weight hit the side hard and the last thing I saw was flailing arms and grasping hands as the canoe bearing Elpida, Gabar, Demetrias, and Maritza—and half of our provisions—went belly up with a splash.

A moment later, Gabar broke the surface with a curse.

“What the blast was that?” he shouted.

“It’s okay, we’re fine,” Elpida called as she appeared next. Maritza came up next, then Demetrias last, breaking through with a gasp of air that turned into a series of coughs. Everyone else had woken up now, shaking the canoe as they sat up and looked around in confusion. A glance downriver showed the bait run was past us and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Don’t panic,” Elpida said. “We can flip the canoe back over. Just do as I say.”

“Um, guys?” Demetrias said, “Is that a problem?” He pulled a hand from the water long enough to point downriver. I looked again.

“Oh.”

The bait fish had turned, headed off by the botos, no doubt. They were coming back for a second pass, the wall of white water surging forward again in the low light of the moon.

“Get out of the water!” Gabar shouted and leaned into a frenzied swim toward the last upright canoe.

“No! Go to shore!” Elpida called, but no one was listening. Maritza was already following Gabar, the both of them stroking through the water in a panic. The fish swept past them, jumping and splashing in a crashing rush of white water.

“You’re going to flip it!” Elpida was cut off as something beneath the surface rammed into her. The air burst from her lungs as she was knocked backward, gasping.

Another dolphin jumped, then splashed back down as Gabar reached the canoe. I tried to wave him away, but he pulled hard, kicking his legs in the water as he tried to climb in. The canoe tipped wildly toward him, sending Senesio, Suni, and Agostos scrambling not to topple in.

“Lean... away!” I shouted, and waved my arms toward the far shore. “To counter his weight!” I might have spent my life as a soldier, but I knew the basics of a rowboat too, and they weren’t all that different from canoes.

“This way,” I grunted, grabbing ahold of Suni’s shoulder and leaning us toward the far side of the canoe. A bait fish slapped into my cheek, leaving a slimy trail behind, but the balance shifted, and the canoe tipped back to something approaching steady.

Senesio tested the canoe’s steadiness a moment, then leaned forward, grabbing Gabar’s arm and helping him out of the water.

“Up you come, big man.”

Before he was fully in, Maritza reached the side as well and began pulling herself up. The added weight jerked the canoe back toward the waterline.

“Don’t!” I yelled, but even as I did, a dolphin slipped past Maritza, its thick skull bumping into her hip. Her eyes went wide as she panicked all the more and fought desperately to climb into the canoe.

“Prisoner!” I shouted. “Lean back. Even out the weight!”

The man looked over to me, bound at the wrists still, and seemingly in shock. He looked down at the canoe, then to Maritza, then back to me. A smile crept across his face.

“Don’t you—” I began, but my words were drowned in a mouthful of water as he threw himself forward and upended the canoe.

Darkness, next, and frothing water and rushing bubbles, swirling all around. I snapped my mouth shut, fighting the urge to gasp for air and swallow a lungful of river in the process.

The water was thick with fish. They were everywhere, small as minnows or up to the size of my hand. Silver and flashing in the moonlight they darted and ducked, whipping through the water. A pink blur rushed right in front of me and near took my nose off. I jerked backwards, arms and legs flailing as I fought toward the surface.

A stream of fish swept over my shoulder, then down through my legs. A boto chased them with jaws open wide and snapped at the slowest of them. It missed and caught my bicep instead.

“Gah!” I screamed underwater, and slapped at the dolphin.

It let go immediately, then lingered a moment, almost as if apologizing.

The water in my lungs forced me toward the surface, and I broke through after two strong kicks. Coughs burst from my throat, sprayed spittle and river into the air. My lungs burned and no matter how much air I choked down, the river wouldn’t get out.

Shore. The thought rang in my mind. Get to shore!

Without consciously picking a direction I swam toward the riverbank. Another dolphin bumped into me, but there wasn’t much force in it. The thing’s tail slapped my hip as it darted off after the fish.

A few more strokes and I was out of the commotion. The water around me had calmed, the bait run having moved upriver, and the dolphins with it.

Other people were swimming with me, or following me, I couldn’t tell. Didn’t have time to ponder. Every second I held my breath coughs threatened to break out, to force more water down my throat. I held strong, swallowing them and ignoring the burning in my lungs as I stroked toward shore. I swam to survive, but most of all I swam for home. Swam as if reaching the far shore was all that separated me from the end of this hellacious mess.

The river grew shallower and my kicking legs soon found mud. A few more paces and I stood up, trudging out of the river and hacking up what felt like an entire lung.

A glance behind told me the others were with me, five or so figures splashing through the darkness toward shore.

They came up one by one, coughing and cursing and soaked through to the bone.

“To hell with this place!” Gabar cursed, stomping onto shore and shaking water from his hair.

“What he said,” Maritza agreed a moment later as she fell to her hands and knees on the bank.

In the commotion the canoes must have come untied from each other. Senesio floated toward shore atop one—because of course he did, the show-off. He stood on its upside-down hull like some sort of hero. It would have been a more impressive image were he not soaked to the bone. Suni followed him, latched on to the boat and letting it pull her to shore.

Elpida came last and I locked forearms with her, then helped her out of the river. She cradled her chest as she walked, half bent over and cursing.

“Think I snapped a rib,” she hissed, before easing down among the tree roots at the edge of the water. “Ahh. Damnit.”

“We’re missing someone,” Senesio said, lithely hopping to shore, then turning back toward the river. My head snapped up at his words. I looked around the group. One, two, three. I looked to my left. Four, five, six, seven. And... and... where was the eighth?

“On the far shore!” Suni shouted, pointing.

And sure enough, there was the prisoner, pulling himself out of the water. His hands were still bound, but he’d apparently made the swim just fine with only his legs. He paused a moment, fighting at his restraints.

“Clever move, my friend, I’ll give you that,” Senesio shouted over at him.

The Bospurian looked at us, spat into the mud, then turned and sprinted into the trees.