Fenzy (5 page)
He made the next turn more gracefully and saw daylight radiating at the end of the tunnel like the gates of heaven.
The bear hit a wall, grunted, came barreling after him.
Squinting against the growing light, Keal pictured himself leaping out of the cave, scrambling for a tree or boulder or anything that would get him away from the beast. Then he could jab the spear down at it.
Out and up
, he thought.
Out
and up
.
Fifteen feet to the cave opening . . . ten . . . five . . .
Leap!
he thought.
But it didn’t quite work out that way. He tripped, hit the ground, and slid out of the cave. His head sailed out over a ledge just outside the cave, and he stopped. He looked down at jagged rocks forty feet below. He flipped onto his back, preparing to kick at the bear, but it wasn’t there.
He heard it panting in the blackness of the cave. Still back in the tunnel, it slowly stepped into the light.
As if it knows I’m
stuck
, he thought.
He saw that the ledge he was on ran only a few feet to one side of the cave before ending in a drop-off. He looked the other way and smiled. The ledge turned into a wide path that sloped down. He scrambled up and stooped to pick up the spear and still-burning torch, which he didn’t remember dropping. He’d need them eventually to lead him to a portal home—he hoped. He edged away from the cave opening, watching the bear watching him. He spun to sprint down the path, and stopped. The path kept widening until it was as wide as a football field where it met a grassy, tree-studded meadow. A dozen lean-tos, covered in animal skins, were aligned along the bank of a river. People mingled around them.
But what made him stop were the men coming up the path. Four of them, animal pelts cinched around their waists, spears and bows in their hands. They pointed at him and began running.
Keal headed for them, glancing over his shoulder at the cave. An arrow flew past him and bounced off the rock around the opening. He ducked and returned his attention to the men. Another arrow hit the ground beside him and skimmed away.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Wait!”
One of the men cocked his spear over his shoulder and threw it.
Keal jumped away, and the spear pierced his footprint. He hurried back to the cave and looked in. The bear hadn’t moved, its head barely in the light. Keal realized the thing knew it wasn’t safe out there. He slipped around the edge into the cave. Another arrow clattered against the opposite wall and bounced along the floor, stopping at the bear’s claws. It rose onto its hind legs, snarling.
Keal ran toward it and jabbed the spear at its chest. A big paw slapped it away, but Keal held on tight. He stepped closer and jabbed again, making firm contact. The bear roared and did what Keal expected: it charged, swinging claws like scythes.
Keal stumbled away, just out of its reach. He stepped from the cave and hooked left, onto the stubby ledge that ended in a drop-off. The bear followed, trying to pull Keal into its embrace. Then its roar turned into an angry bellow, and it turned its back to Keal. Two arrows protruded from its shoul-ders. It lumbered toward the men who had shot it, allowing Keal to dart back into the cave.
He ran, then turned to check for the bear. It stood in the sunlight, swinging its paws. An arrow struck its arm, and the beast went for the men, disappearing from the front of the cave. Animal roars and human yells drifted in to Keal.
He held up the burning straw and ran deeper into the cave.
David kept his eyes on the chain linking him to Xander and the rest of the child prisoners. It would droop or snap tight depending on how well he matched his brother’s steps.
“Xander,” he said. “Please . . . just say something.” Xander’s silence was worse than anything, worse even than crying or screaming. It was the sound of giving up. Dad had once told him
Where there’s life, there’s hope
. And they weren’t dead, not yet. So there was hope. The hope of escape. The hope of surviv-ing this hopeless situation. “
Xander!”
Xander glanced over his shoulder. “Quiet, Dae,” he whis-pered. “Don’t give them any reason to use that whip on us.”
Anger flared inside David. This wasn’t right, treating people this way. That the victims were children made the evil even worse.
“What do I care?” he said, raising his voice. “We’re prison-ers, Xander . . .
slaves
. We’re going to die on some battlefield because Taksidian said so, because we moved into the wrong house!”
Xander twisted to throw a shocked expression at David. The blue of his irises appeared darker, as though the terror and desperation inside him were seeping into them. “What are you doing?” he said. He glanced around. “Be quiet!”
“Why?” David practically yelled. “What are they going to do, chain us up? Kill us?”
The chains jerked Xander forward, then David. Xander said, “They can make you wish you were dead. That whip hurts.”
David tilted his head toward the sky and screamed long and hard: “Aaaaahhhhhggggg!”
The whip bit into his side. It felt like a bullet shattering his ribs. He buckled over, fell, and bumped over the cobble-stones on his stomach as the chain gang pulled him along. His chin cracked against the road. Bits of garbage and dirt scraped his arms, sprayed his face. He slid through a puddle of liquid so foul smelling, his lungs clamped shut. He gagged and coughed.
“David!” Xander said, trying to see him, manage the chains, and walk at the same time.
David could tell Xander had shifted to a bow-legged walk to keep his heels from kicking David’s face. Xander tried to stop, leaning back to yank on the chains. But there were too many kids in the line, all trudging forward like sled dogs. He stumbled forward and almost fell himself.
David grabbed Xander’s waistband, tugged himself up, got walking again. He blinked, pushing tears out of his eyes. The gross stuff he’d slid through soaked his tunic, and every breath made him want to puke. He whispered, “Don’t say it.”
“What?”
“Don’t say
I told you so
.”
The line turned left out of the square and onto a street that ran beside a wide river. It bent out of sight behind him, and David realized it was the same river he and Xander had seen from Taksidian’s hillside home. It separated this awful place of boisterous men, child slaves, and peddlers of weapons and slaughtered animals from a beautiful mountain city. He looked back across the square. Over vendor stalls, buildings, and a rocky hill, he could see the golden castle that perched atop the mountain. It glittered in the sun. Flags spaced along its ramparts fluttered, while a waterfall flowed from beneath the castle and dropped to the avenue below, sparkling as though diamonds churned beneath its surface.
Taksidian had said it was there Mom was taken after being kidnapped from their house. But she’d escaped. David prayed she’d found a way out of Atlantis, away from this culture obsessed by violence and war.
I’m sorry, Mom
, he thought.
We tried to find you, we really did
. He could hardly stand the thought that he would never see her again. Somehow that seemed even worse than heading into battle against his will.
The water was on the chain gang’s right side. On the left side, buildings lined the street as far as David could see. The nearest were open garage-sized stalls filled with crates. Farther up appeared to be a series of taverns. Laughter, shouts, and weird music like cats stuck in a box wafted out at them. To their right was the ship, a big
Pirates-of-the-Caribbean
-type thing. As they shuffled past, David watched the sailors on board: moving crates, coiling ropes, checking their swords and spears, bows and arrows, helmets and body armor. But he wasn’t see-ing them, not really. He was thinking, letting his mind examine every possible way of escape—the way he might have studied the size, speed, and movements of an opposing soccer team back in Pasadena, when winning a game was the only thing he had to worry about.
He bumped into Xander and realized the line had stopped. Chains rattled as the kids shuffled into a tight group. The front guard stomped up a gangplank leading up to the rear of the ship. He hopped onto the ship’s deck, looked around, and disappeared through a door. David could hear his footsteps descending stairs.
That’s where they’ll keep us
, he thought.
Down in some dark, smelly
hold
.
He didn’t know how long the voyage to Greece would be, but he’d bet it would be weeks. Didn’t these old sailing ships take forever to get anywhere? Weeks down there, smashed in with three dozen other kids, maybe a bunch of slaves and sail-ors. If they were lucky, some of them would see the light of day now and then, when they were ordered to swab the decks or something.
He wondered if his stomach would get used to the lurching ocean movements. Last year, his sixth-grade class had gone out on a tugboat from Los Angeles Harbor. Half of them had barfed their lunches over the railing. David hadn’t, but he’d felt like it. Probably these Atlantians wouldn’t even feed them, so before long they’d have nothing to puke up.
The guard reappeared and yelled down to the guard with the whip, obviously ticked about something. The whip-man returned his own angry words. He grunted in disgust and pushed past the children to the gangplank. Halfway up he turned back, pointed at the kids, and shook the whip at them. The kids gasped and yelped in fear. Most of them ducked their heads. Satisfied, the whip-man boarded the ship and disappeared into the hold with his partner.
“They’re probably mad that they’ve given us too much room,” Xander said. “Like a broom closet.”
The shackles were heavy on David’s wrists. They were wide and thick contraptions, rusty and showing hammer marks from being pounded into shape. The left one ground into his cast, the right one was a little looser. He wiggled his hand, tried to slip it through, but it was too tight.
If only .
. .
Then he remembered.
“Xander,” he whispered. When his brother turned a mis-erable expression toward him, David smiled and said, “I have an idea!”
The cluster of Atlantian children shifted nervously on the dock beside the ship that was to take them to war. Their chains rattled, the sound of lost hope. Bound to them, but standing apart, the King brothers whispered to each other.
“Look,” David said, swiveling his rump toward Xander and hitching up his tunic to expose his jeans.
His brother scowled at him. “Yeah, that tunic totally makes your butt look fat. I think you’ve been hit on the head too many times.”
“My pocket!” David said. “I can’t reach.”
Xander squinted. “What is that?”
“Shampoo. I was going to squirt it in Phemus’s eyes when we were hiding in the tub. Then you took off after him, and I stuck it in my pocket. I forgot.”
“I don’t think these guys care if your hair’s clean, David.” He shook his head.
“Just get it, will you?
Can
you?”
Xander shifted around as far as the chains would let him, and stretched his arms. “Almost,” he said. Then: “Got it.” He showed David. It was oval-shaped and not “family sized”— both features that had allowed it to fit in his pocket in the first place. But now it was also bent and crushed. Yellowish sham-poo oozed from the top and coated the bottle.
“Oh, no,” David said. “Is there any left?”
Xander shook it. “Feels like it.”
David held up his shackles. “Squirt some on my wrist.”
Xander smiled. “I get it, yeah.” They stretched toward each other, and Xander snapped his head back, a pinched look on his face. “Holy cow, man. You stink.”
David glanced down at the wet stain that covered his shirt from neck to belly button. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Come on . . . “ He rattled his shackles.
Xander squeezed a glob out onto the back of David’s right hand. David smeared the slippery goop around and worked it under the edge of the shackle. Holding the brace with his left hand, he rotated his hand and tried to tug it through.
“Is it working?” Xander said.
“Give me a minute.” David felt the bones in his hand compressing and sliding under the rough metal. His hand popped out of the shackle. He grinned at Xander and looked around to see if anyone was watching. He let the cuff hang by the chain looped through the other shackle and grabbed the bottle. The left one proved more difficult: the soldier had squeezed the cuff into his cast. But the shampoo made even that slick enough to get his hand out.
“Get mine,” Xander said—as if David wouldn’t.
David squirted the shampoo on Xander’s hand, and his brother started working on it. Watching for the guards or anyone else who wanted them chained, David said, “Hurry.”
“These are kid-sized shackles,” Xander observed, grunting at the effort. “Bet they’re all the same size. That’s why it was so easy for you. I’m bigger.”
“It’s not working?” David said, panicked.
“No,” Xander said. “Just go, save yourself.” But his hand was already out, and he was smiling.
“Come on,” David said, irritated at the lump in his throat Xander’s joke had given him. “Get the other one.”