Quest Beyond Time (6 page)

They were moving along the riverbank, eastward toward the sea, when Katrin heard something. Mike did not hear it, but she heard it. She gestured to him and they went to ground.

Some seconds later he heard it. It was the sound of oars in rowlocks. Mike had spent a lot of time in small boats and he knew the sound well.

They lay in cover, watching, waiting.

A few moments later, the boat came into view. It was about three metres long, pointed at each end, and constructed of overlapping planks. Four men sat in it. They were like the River Yobbies they had seen at the ford, but were not wearing their steel helmets. To Mike’s eyes, each of the men looked about the same size as Fergus. Two of them were rowing. The other two were watching the riverbanks as they passed. Mike felt very grateful for the sharpness of Katrin’s hearing.

As they watched them go past, Mike noticed a certain gleam in Katrin’s eyes. He knew what she was thinking.

‘Ah … we are not going to steal that particular boat. Are we?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think they’d see the joke.’

‘River Yobbies have no sense of humour anyway. It’s well known.’

‘They don’t look as if they laugh much.’

‘Oh, they laugh. At hangings, impalings . . . that sort of thing.’

‘Couldn’t we steal someone else’s boat?’

‘No one else is stupid enough to have a boat.’

‘I don’t think we should steal their boat.’

‘Mike, how are you ever going to be a warrior if you think like this?’

‘I don’t want to be a warrior. I want to be a videogame technician.’

She ignored that. He was relieved that she ignored it. He did not think he could even begin to explain to her what a videogame was. Let alone a technician.

She watched as the boat rowed out of sight. Then she got to her feet.

‘Come on. We’re going to steal that boat.’

‘You never listen, do you?’ said Mike. ‘You never ever listen to me!’

She was already moving away. He picked up the hang-glider and followed.

They had to make their preparations in the dark. They had followed the River Yobbies through the afternoon, and watched them as they set up their camp for the night.

Then Katrin explained to Mike what her plan was, and together they made the necessary preparations.

Now all that was left was the dangerous bit. Mike felt as he felt just before every flight. He knew he could not go through with it. He also knew he had to.

For Katrin was the most aggravating young woman he had ever met. She could out-run him, she was trained with weapons, and he suspected that she was just as strong as he was. Admittedly he could swim and she could not, but that was counter-balanced by the fact that she thought people who swam were stupid. They were stupid to do it in the first place, and doubly stupid afterwards because of the Dark Ones eating their brains.

To his own way of thinking, Mike had never had much trouble in impressing girls. With Katrin he could not get to first base. And this aggravated him more than even he himself realized. Still, he thought, he would show her when it came to getting to this stupid Island. He could use a hang-glider which was more than anyone else in this century could do.

There was, however, something they had to do first. They had to steal a boat from four men who looked as if they lived on a diet of barbed wire, bottles and babies.

There they were, sitting by the fire, roasting meat on skewers. They had pulled their boat halfway out of the water and had run a mooring line to a tree. Clearly, Mike thought, the Dark Ones had not eaten their brains up entirely.

Mike and Katrin lay in cover in the undergrowth, watching them.

The four River Yobbies were occasionally turning the skewers of meat, and whiling away the time until it cooked by passing a bulging leather bottle from hand to hand. Judging from the way they handled it, the skin contained some kind of booze. They slurped, let the drink dribble down their chins, wiped their hairy mouths on the backs of their hairy hands, and belched gently to show polite appreciation. They reminded Mike of his father’s friends at backyard barbecues.

He pondered wryly on the fact that even a nuclear holocaust could not wipe out this one great Australian tradition. Meanwhile, the smell of the sizzling meat was making him feel very hungry.

Now Katrin nudged him. It was time to get moving. They both wriggled backward away from the fire, and then he headed for the river and she turned inland.

The four Yobbies sat passing the wineskin.

Katrin moved silently through the forest which ran down to the riverbank.

And Mike moved to the river, slipped silently into the water, and swam into the darkness.

A Yobby leaned forward and turned a skewer. Then looked up as he heard a footfall. They all looked up.

A girl, dressed in the style of the plains clans, was standing grinning at them.

One of the Yobbies beckoned to her.

She made a face at him, then turned and ran. The Yobby who had beckoned jumped to his feet and set off after her. He was big but he was fast. She was faster. She seemed to flicker through the dark forest ahead of him. She skirted bushes as he burst through them, but still she stayed ahead.

Then she stumbled and fell.

The Yobby grinned, and rushed toward her.

One foot went down, a twig snapped, a running noose ran tight round his ankle, a bent sapling sprang upward, and the Yobby suddenly found himself hanging upside down, suspended by one foot, his head a metre from the ground.

The girl moved toward him in a mocking, dancing walk. He grabbed for her. She dodged behind him and pushed, and set him swinging to and fro.

‘To me!’ he roared, ‘to me!’

At the campfire, the other three Yobbies heard the yell. They stood, put down the skewers they had been eating from, and ran into the forest.

Mike watched from the water as they disappeared into the darkness. He swam to the bank, and climbed out, drawing his borrowed knife from its sheath. He moved to the head of the beached boat, cut the mooring line and started pushing the boat back into the water.

In the forest, the Yobby swung from one foot. Of Katrin there was no sign. ‘To me!’ he yelled. The crashing in the forest showed that his call was being answered.

A moment later the three other Yobbies crashed out of the woods and stood staring at him. They nudged each other. They began to laugh.

‘Who is guarding the boat!’ yelled the Yobby on the rope.

They looked at each other. It did not take even River Yobbies more than a moment to work out that if they were all here, no one was back there. And that meant, even to a River Yobby, that no one was guarding the boat. The three of them turned and started back toward the boat.

‘Lief! Stay!’ shouted the upside-down Yobby. He was thinking that sometimes it was not easy to be a leader. One of the other Yobbies turned and ran back to him as the others crashed off through the woods toward the river.

Back at the river, Mike was tugging the boat out into the water. The boat was heavy, an easy lift for four Yobbies, not so easy for Mike. Katrin burst from the woods and ran to him, and together they slid the boat down into the river. Katrin leapt into it, carefully avoiding contact with the river. Mike looked back. He could not resist.

‘Mike!’

But Mike was already running back to the campfire, and grabbing up the untouched skewers of meat. He was hungry and the smell had been tantalizing him all the time he had been working.

As he turned from the fire, the two Yobbies who had come back to guard the boat crashed out of the woods into the firelight. They stopped, took in the scene and it penetrated their minds that all was not as it should be. If they thought slowly, they moved fast. One of the things they did very fast was to draw swords.

The swords rasped out of their scabbards, and they lifted them, running forward at Mike. Then one howled. Katrin’s throwing knife was in his wrist and he had dropped his sword.

She stood in the boat reaching another throwing knife from her boot as Mike raced toward her. He ducked and the knife whirred over his head. He heard another wild howl as he leapt into the boat, still carrying the skewers of meat. Then he grabbed up an oar and thrust them out into the stream.

One of the Yobbies, blood running from his wrist, ran into the water and grabbed for them. Mike swung the oar at him, knocking him off-balance. The Yobby slipped and fell into the water.

The stream was catching them, bearing them away. Mike sat and fixed the oars into the rowlocks and began rowing.

‘That was well done,’ said Katrin.

‘Don’t tell me it was well done till we’re out of here,’ Mike snarled.

‘We’ve escaped!’ she said.

‘You say they can swim,’ he answered, rowing hard.

‘Even River Yobbies aren’t stupid enough to swim here,’ she said. ‘It’s tidal. There are sharks.’

He closed his eyes as he continued to row. ‘Part of your plan,’ he said, ‘involved me swimming here.’

‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘You’re a warrior.’

He opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘I am?’

‘Well, you will be. One day.’

So he had not impressed her yet.

She was keeping an eye on the northern riverbank. After a while, she said ‘here’, and he rowed in to the bank. There were their packs, and his hang-glider and her bow and quiver of arrows.

They loaded them, then rowed on into the night.

When daylight came they were still on the river. Mike was steering the boat, allowing the current to take it toward its mouth, and Katrin was curled up, asleep.

As they drifted down the river into the first light before dawn, Mike was amazed at the abundance of bird life on the water. He had never seen anything like it. Clean air, clean water and a small human population had allowed the birds to breed hugely. As the sun came up he watched a flight of black swans, skimming like great darts across the sky, and then from another direction came the halting flight and the high cries of a band of flying foxes heading back toward their daylight camp.

He let Katrin sleep, as the sun rose, striking toward them up the river, and then decided that he needed an expert opinion on what new horrors they would be running into if they just kept drifting like this.

He picked up a skewer of meat, and then reached out with his other hand and tapped Katrin on the arm.

As she woke, her hand went to the hilt of her shortsword, and it was halfway out of the scabbard before she saw Mike and smiled.

The smile warmed him more than the morning sun did. She did not often smile, and when she did it was usually over something that for him had no connexion with humour or pleasure.

He handed her the skewer of meat. ‘Breakfast.’

She began to eat, hungrily. Her eyes scanned the terrain they were drifting through. ‘We’ll have to get off the river soon.’

‘I thought the whole point was to steal a boat.’

‘And it’s helped a lot. Saved us maybe a day. But the River Yobbies control this stretch.’

‘But we got away!’ Mike was proud of how they had stolen the boat from those four monsters and got away with it. It was one of the most exciting things he had ever done.

‘We’re going into their territory. Not away from it.’

‘Into their territory.’ This was like a bad dream.

She nodded, pleased that he had understood the point. ‘Their territory ends about where they were camped on the ford. The good thing is, we’ve got that party’s boat and they can’t have raised the alarm yet.’

‘They could get there by foot.’

‘Not at night. Not fast enough.’

Mike found that thought very comforting. He began to eat meat from his skewer. Then something made him look toward the northern riverbank.

What he saw there caused him to choke. He pointed, but Katrin was already looking.

The river was passing through open country, and two River Yobbies, both of them awfully familiar, were galloping along on horses. It appeared to be more than a social ride. They were shouting and gesticulating at Mike and Katrin as if they wanted to have a conversation. Mike got the impression that the conversation could turn out to be either slow and painful, or quick and violent. Whichever form the conversation took, he did not wish to be there when it happened.

‘I don’t understand this!’ Katrin seemed puzzled.

‘I understand it. They want their boat back.’

‘They can’t ride horses!’

‘What?’

‘It’s a well known fact that River Yobbies can’t ride horses!’

‘No one seems to have told them that!’ Mike had grabbed the oars and was intending to row to the southern bank and start running.

Then Katrin pointed to the southern bank. Two more River Yobbies, recognizable as the other half of the team they had stolen the boat from, were riding along the other bank.

Mike changed plans fast. He guided them into the central channel of the river and rowed hard. The horses easily kept pace with them. ‘Any ideas?’ he said.

As if in answer to his question, one of the Yobbies yelled out that he intended to slice them into pieces.

‘Keep your foul tongue still or I’ll feed it to my dog!’ Katrin replied to him.

‘Don’t. . . get them upset,’ Mike said.

‘The man I will skin and tan for my floor!’ the Yobby went on.

Mike decided to negotiate before Katrin made things any worse. ‘Can’t we discuss this in a civilized manner!’ he yelled to the nearest Yobby.

‘I spit on your civilized!’

‘I thought he might take that view,’ Mike muttered to himself and kept rowing.

‘And I spit on your mother!’ Katrin shouted.

The Yobbies roared with anger at this. She had hit a nerve.

‘You’re a real loss to diplomacy, Katrin. Did you know that?’

Knowing when she was on a winning streak, Katrin added, by way of detail, ‘I spit on her womb!’

This got an even bigger response than the first one. She was greatly encouraged.

‘I spit on her breasts that fed you! And that fed the village dogs!’

The Yobbies were raving and shouting now.

‘And the village pigs!’

‘Katrin, you are making any sort of negotiation very difficult.’ Mike saw a Yobby ride his horse into the shallows. He was waving a sword at them and seemed to have gone purple in the face. ‘Very difficult indeed.’

She was looking around at the terrain. ‘Mike. . .’

‘Why don’t we just give them the boat back. Explain it was all a terrible mistake.’

‘Mike. I’ve got a crazy idea. But it just might work.’

He gaped at her. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’ve got a crazy idea . . .’

‘That’s what I thought you said.’ He felt like putting his head in his hands, but his hands were full of oars.

‘Just round this next bend of the river. We’re nearly at the forest.’

‘What’s the forest going to do for us?’

‘Save our lives.’

‘That’s what I want to hear from you, Katrin. That kind of thinking. Congratulations.’

As they rounded the next bend and entered the new reach of the river, he saw that she was correct. The open country which had flanked the river on each side now gave way to steep, rocky banks with dense forest coming down to the water’s edge.

‘They can’t see us for the next mile,’ Katrin said, ‘so we’ll get ashore, and refloat the boat. Let it drift down.’

‘Why?’

‘So they’ll think we’re hiding in the bottom of it. They might follow it awhile.’

Katrin pointed out a tiny beach on the south side of the river, and Mike rowed them to it. They unloaded the hang-glider and their packs, and then pushed the boat back into the stream.

Mike watched the boat as the current caught it, and took it downstream. As it drifted away from him, he felt a pang of regret. He had felt safe in the boat. Then a nasty thought came to him. ‘What if they second-guess us?’ he asked, ‘and come into the forest?’

‘They’ll never do that,’ Katrin said as she adjusted the straps on her pack. ‘They’re too frightened.’

Mike thought about the River Yobbies and then wondered what they could possibly be frightened of. He was not sure he wanted to know. On the other hand he knew that, generally speaking, an unknown danger scared him more than a known one. ‘What are they frightened of?’

‘The Forest People.’ She was ready to move out. She turned and looked for the best way up from the beach.

‘Why are the River Yobbies frightened of the Forest People, Katrin?’ He was trying to keep his voice calm. There was one part of him wanting to deliver the question in a high-pitched shriek. So he kept his voice deep, like a politician on television trying to sound sincere.

She said it casually. ‘The Forest People are cannibals. They eat anyone who goes in the forest.’ She chuckled. ‘The stupid Yobbies are terrified of them.’

Mike now realized it was one of those rare occasions when the known danger scared him more than the unknown. ‘They terrify me, too,’ he said.

She seemed not to hear him. ‘This way,’ she said, moving from one rock to another.

‘Katrin!’

She turned. ‘Yes?’

‘The Forest People eat anyone they catch in the forest, right?’

‘Right!’

‘Then why are we going into the forest?’

‘Mike, are you just going to stand there talking all day?’ She turned again and started on into the forest.

‘At least I’m not scared of swimming!’ he yelled. He looked back at the river and for a moment he considered taking his chances with the sharks. But that did not seem such a good idea either.

So he turned and followed Katrin into the forest.