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Page 35.

Alex had killed Nizin and many of his men.

He’d made the mistake of leaving Nizin’s son and his overseer alive, when he could have killed them while they were unconscious. Alex berated himself for the latter mistake. What saved him and Maryan, at least for a while, was that everyone at the site was out cold, and that the site was far from the settlement. It must have taken them hours to get together a search party with nets, guns, and Thuga porters.

Maryan and Alex headed away from the coast. Alex dreaded being weaponless—another mistake—and there was no time to sit around making anything more than a sharpened stick for a spear. They found two good cudgels that would have to do—They’d be helpless if they ran up against any rippers, but they were free for the moment. Free of the Siirk and their horrible ways.

They would expect them to head northeast to their valley, perhaps to the island which by now must be known to the Siirk also.

Talking it over, Alex and Maryan agreed to go home. Where else could they go? For now, they must simply get away in an unexpected direction. And they did. Jogging east in forests that had no trails other than those of small animals, they covered about 25 miles a day. They ate what came to hand—eggs, worms, beetles, roots. They drank from streams.

To confound any sniffer animals they might bring, they walked west a distance in one stream, then east a distance in another.

Alex could read the sun and the sky pretty well, and he kept them going as directly north and east as possible, as far from the coast as they could go.

They never did hear the hoof beats of any pursuers.

“What are they going to do?” asked Maryan as they sat huddled together a few nights later, afraid to go to sleep.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping this wilderness runs on forever and that we’re not trapped in some Siirk society.” he told her about the sight he’d seen in the veiled tent, sparing her the details. She shivered, and he held her close.

He was wondering privately if they should just take their lives together, maybe go back and jump into the sea holding hands. It would be quick, it would be mutual, and it would be the end of their suffering.

He must seemed very down just then, for she embraced him, still trembling as she was, and held him silently while they listened for Siirk death to come down the trail.

But it didn’t. Not yet.

Within a few days, he hunted a few smaller animals by hurling rocks at them.

Alex and Maryan dared not make fire, but ate the bleeding, greasy meat cold right off the bone, like animals. As humans, they did not make good carnivores, and they retched up some of it, but enough stayed to keep them in protein and fat.

Alex used the intestines to fashion several bowstrings. Soon, he was armed with a light bow and some arrows sharpened by rubbing on boulders that they passed. The boulders looked as they might have eons ago, light green in various shades of lichen on top, and dark, mossy green on the downward facing facets.

One time, from some heights, they did see a solitary ripper in the distance, but it was traveling laterally from them, west, as if tracking some game, and they didn’t make its acquaintance. “They can’t go back to their valley,” Maryan said with a sigh.

They’d had this conversation a thousand times. They could go back, and perhaps nobody would bother them for a while, but it would be suicide in the long run—Kogran was now presumably chieftain, or Omas if he had killed Kogran—and they’d be cruising back in their boats looking not just for revenge, but for some way to wring or torture a new sphere out of them.

Never once did they pass any sign of past civilization. That always amazed him. A million years could wipe out all traces of humanity. A dozen or so ice ages could scrape Manhattan clean of everything from skyscrapers to subway tunnels. He’d bet not even the contours of their cities could be seen anymore from a plane or from space. They must have gone 200 miles west when a longing made them turn north along a wide river—a child of the Mississippi? This far north? No signs of civilization here. That told him much—this world had more than one intelligent species now, but they had not spread very far. Which left a lot of wilderness for them to hide in?

They became nomads—new Native Americans, carrying their few possessions as they went. They made a few simple bowls out of wood, and knives out of stone and bone. He made stronger bows and arrows, and on one occasion had to kill a ripper and her cub. He’d stumbled on the cub, and the mother attacked—no choice there. They had enough hides to make a shelter at night, and they were not afraid to light a small fire. They knew how to make their fire as little smoky as possibly—burn very dry wood, cook fast, put the fire out, and bury it.

Then the days started getting shorter, and they began to think about winter. They had only one place to go, and that was their home in ripper valley. He hoped the Siirk did not travel much in winter.

It was time for them to go home.