Finding Fortune 4/?
It was supposed to be a simple excavation. One chaotic storm later, it has become anything but.
Fabi had nothing against sleeping pressed against other people when circumstances demanded it or between Jo and Mäx when it was butt-freezing cold and they needed to be chest to back to keep warm. It definitely wasn’t the weirdest thing they had done together. Mäx was like his brother, and Jo was his brother. That came with a certain intimacy. So he was cool with doing what he had to do when he had to do it. He was not cool with waking up with something hard poking him in the back and the only possibilities being Mäx’s pocketknife (unlikely considering the size and shape) and Mäx’s other parts.
Nope, Fabi was definitely not going to lie there and deal with that.
He scrambled out from between Jo and Mäx quickly and then, partially because he was fucking traumatized (though not as traumatized as he would’ve been had it been Jo) and partially because he had to pee like a bitch, out of the hole Mäx had dug. He may have run mentally screaming for a good long way before finding a nice patch of snow to pee on.
When he was done and had zipped up his shitty pants that didn’t want to cooperate because they were soaked and dotted with falling snow, he decided to walk around a bit, mostly to, uh, avoid having to go snuggle between his brother and a hard-on he was not going to appreciate right then or, like, ever. The snow had cleared up overnight (Fabi guessed it was sometime in the late morning), and he could just make out some shaggy animal a ways off.
As he watched, eyes staying closed just a little too long every time he blinked, small bipeds slowly approached the animal, branches gathered in their hands. Probably, they were trying to scare the strange animal away from their territory. A biologist would likely find this interaction fascinating. Fabi, in his sleep-sluggish state, had trouble focusing his eyes on the sight.
Suddenly, the animal let out a wounded cry, a low bellowing sound similar to a cow’s, and staggered to the ground. The bipeds moved closer, brandishing their sticks. One of them raised his stick above the animal and thrust it downwards, piercing the animal’s hide.
They weren’t sticks at all. They were spears.
“Holy shit,” Fabi said. “Those are people!”
ØØØ
It wasn’t that the people Fabi had found were hostile, because they weren’t. Jo could deal with hostile by being hostile right back. If that didn’t work, he could shove Mäx at them. If that didn’t work, he’d throw Fabi their way because nobody could hate Fabi. He was annoying as shit sometimes but not hateable. Hostile was easy to deal with.
No, these assholes were nosy. They got all up in Jo and Mäx, and Fabi’s spaces (less Fabi than Jo or Mäx, but our hero will get to that in a moment), picking at clothing and plucking at necklaces and armbands, sticking their fingers in places they did not belong, and just generally being enormous nuisances.
At least, that’s how Jo saw it. Fabi was very happy to pick, pluck, and stick right back at them.
They, of course, didn’t speak any recognizable language.
ØØØ
It was disconcerting being underground for so long. The grass mats made Linke’s skin itch long after he’d stopped touching them, but that was as nothing against the intense terror he felt when he saw so much rock overheard and only a bit of light far in the upper distance. No one needed to know any of this, of course.
Their hosts, the Neanderthal-like people who didn’t speak a lick of any language Linke knew except for the woman Jan had befriended, moved in and out of the cave, easily tracking their way up the breakdown. Linke chose not to watch once he had to look up to see them. Only the lucky could survive that fall.
Something told him the old woman wasn’t someone to be trusted. Her own people kept away from her; didn’t talk to her. They had been less friendly once they saw that Jan and Juri were talking to her. But she spoke German and that was far more effective than any charades could ever be.
So Linke got up from where he had been sorting through his pack, looking for anything that might prove useful and just basically trying to figure out what else Frank had shoved in there. There were a few notebooks, a phone (worthless), batteries of different sizes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, pens and pencils, a book to read, and sample bags. From Frank, a comb, a utensil set and bowl, two carving knives wrapped in a dish towel that Linke wasn’t going to ask about, some dry clothes belonging to both him and Juri, and seven pull-tab cans of food. This explained a lot. It also hardened Linke’s resolve to make Juri carry the pack from that point on. There was no good reason Juri couldn’t lug his own shit around.
He placed the pack down next to Juri, who flicked his eyes to it for a second before looking away. Annoyed, Linke picked it up and dropped it to the ground, where it made a satisfying thunk from all the cans.
“Your turn,” he said. Juri nodded and waved at him to sit down, which Linke did. But not because Juri told him to.
Jan’s new friend, who called herself Ivgalrea (Jan had botched the name the first few times he tried to tell Linke, causing Juri to patiently correct him- Juri’s patience with Jan would have been astounding if not for the very simple fact that the guy would do anything if it got him that much closer to having Jan naked, willing, and under him), had gathered a woven bowl filled with dirt. Sitting on her calves on (as per the local custom, it seemed), she upended the bowl onto a patch of bare stone and smoothed it out with her hands.
“What’s going on?” Linke asked.
“She’s gonna tell us about the island,” Jan said, face bright with excitement. Linke hadn’t shared his worries with Jan about Ivgalrea. She didn’t seem out to hurt him, at least.
“Six groups live on this island.” Ivgalrea drew a loose circle in the dirt, then four dots presumably to represent the cardinal directions. “People you see around you are Yuluk. They live wherever they can, mostly in caves. Mountain people live here.” She drew a small crescent along the northeastern side. “Beyond steppes is valley. On north side live Utmoak. On south side live Kumjenak. Big River flows from mountains into valley. Wherever the River flows, there are river people, Lachik.”
“I thought you said there were six?”
“Sixth move with herds.” Ivgalrea shrugged her shoulders. “We only see in late summer. They keep to themselves.”
“So, we go into the valley and try to find the river people, hoping they’ll agree to do what?”
“Lachik tell stories about another island far to the south, about people with light-colored eyes…and pale hair.”
“It could be Iceland,” Frank offered.
“It also could be someone else entirely,” Linke contradicted. “Why would they help us?” he asked the old woman.
“They are from your world, no? A people with yellow hair-” She looked pointedly at Jan and Juri- “who travel in enormous boats, wearing clothing river people have seen nowhere else.”
Juri didn’t look too happy with that.
“If Icelanders have met the river people before, why hasn’t the world heard of this place?”
“Do you follow Icelandic news?” Jan asked.
“…no,” Juri said reluctantly, looking like it pained him. Mentally, Linke rolled his eyes. Because Jan really cared whether Juri regularly read Icelandic news. That man was just sad sometimes.
“Exactly.”
A strange look passed over Frank’s face but was just as quickly replaced with a benign smile when Linke looked his way. Linke would worry, but it was Frank. He’d probably just had an actual thought for once.
ØØØ
The Neanderthals, who Linke now knew to be the Yuluk, produced a feast in their honor. Bowl after woven bowl was laid out, filled with cooked vegetables and roots. A cervid had been killed and roasted over a spit for several hours, the smell of cooked meat filling the cave. Scapulae from large ruminants served as plates, shaped vertebrae as cups. With Ivgalrea doing sparse translating, some understanding was reached.
Things seemed to be going well until Juri asked Lakti, the headman, if he knew where they could find a boat. Midway through the translation, Lakti began yelling at Ivgalrea. She responded to this by doing some yelling of her own, this little, hunched over old lady taking on a burly man in the prime of his life. It was, needless to say, not propitious.
When they finally calmed down, Ivgalrea declined to translate what Lakti had said. She explained that- and this Linke didn’t believe for a second- Lakti had put her in charge of helping them find a boat. The Lachik, she said, would be able to help them.
“It…take several days to get to Lachik’s main camp,” Ivgalrea said, looking warily at Lakti. The headman had his arms folded across his chest. All the other Yuluks were looking carefully away or concentrating far too intently on their food. “If we find Lachik along Big River, less.”
Linke stopped her.
“Why are you really helping us, Ivgalrea? What’s in it for you?”
Ivgalrea paused, considering.
“I want to leave this island,” she said Juri-slow. Her eyes darted towards Lakti before looking at the four of them in turn, almost as those she was pleading with them. What reason could an old woman have to plead with them? They were lost, shipwrecked on an island far from anyone they knew. They had nothing Linke saw that they could offer her, and that made him more than a little suspicious. “These people- they are not good to me, my family. They call my grandmother a sorceress. Now that I am old, they call me also. We travel, my mother and I, when I was a child. We looked for someone who would be good to us. Everywhere was same. No good. I am…tired of fear. I am tired of this island.
“I will lead you to Lachik, but you must take me with you.”
“Done,” Linke said immediately, not bothering to confer with the others. Jan was gung-ho for Ivgalrea to go with them, it was all over his face, Juri would go along with whatever Jan wanted, and Frank was too polite to stop Ivgalrea even if he wanted to. “You show us the way; we’ll take you with us.”
ØØØ
They left an hour later. Lakti seemed eager for them to leave, piling them with gifts of furs and sustenance but asking for nothing in return. There were places where hospitality was a quasi-sacred duty, but, in those instances, hospitality was usually extended to fellow travelers or one’s countrymen. The feeling that something was being kept hidden from them remained with Linke.
The headman’s words to Ivgalrea as they prepared to leave were harsh, the condescending tone coming across perfectly for all the language differences. She returned in kind, standing up as straight as her age-hunched back would allow. It was an uncomfortable spectacle, just like this morning had been.
In the end, though, some conclusion was reached- hopefully not Ivgalrea getting banned from the cave for life or anything because Jan or Frank would likely feel horrible about something none of them could control- and the elderly woman told them they could leave.
There weren’t any goodbyes to say, in all truth, so it was a bit odd when Frank stopped and said that he would “just be a minute”. Jan pouted, not unreasonably, when Frank produced a chocolate bar from his pack and unwrapped it before giving it to the headman. After some pantomiming of eating it, Frank got its use across and they were able to get on their way.
A little part of Linke smiled inside when Frank trotted up to walk beside him.
ØØØ
“So, do you know how to get off this island?” Jan, kicking a loose rock out of the way, asked Ivgalrea. The old woman’s expression shifted to one of puzzlement, her wrinkles deepening in her confusion. Jan repeated his question in simpler words.
“I have never…left,” she told him. “Almost no one leaves. The wind…and the sea. They are hard. Ships founder.” Jan nodded. They’d learned that about five minutes before they’d followed Juri’s bellowed command and plunged into the ocean. “But there may be someone in city who know.” It was the first long sentence she had said without any mistakes or pauses. Actually, Jan wasn’t sure about that. His brain played tricks on him sometimes, making things make sense when they didn’t, so maybe he was just getting used to how she talked and his brain was editing everything to make it easier to understand. Either way, Ivgalrea wasn’t talking as brokenly as before.
“City?” Jan echoed. “What city?”
“Yeah,” Frank said, sliding over. “What city?”
“You did not think we were all people here, did you?” She laughed, sounding uncomfortably like a witch cackling. Oh, great, this sweet old lady was going to kill them and it was all going to be Jan’s fault because he talked to her and, like, what if he was starting to understand her because she’d put a spell on him? That would be so messed up…and impossible. Impossible like living, breathing wooly mammoths and people living, actually freaking living, in the Stone Age. “There is…city two days’ walk from here. From city, it is possible to go anywhere.”
Jan didn’t ask why Ivgalrea had never tried to leave if it was “possible to go anywhere”, why a little, old lady would choose to live up in the frozen steppes if she could live in a nice, big city.
He really should have asked.
ØØØ
It was a collection of huts, was what he meant. Well, not really huts, more like hide and brush covered wooden frames, but Jan didn’t have a word for that, so he was calling them huts.
Ivgalrea- who Jan was calling Ivga from now on since she’d said that was okay- had said her daughter lived there.
“This is not city,” Ivga clarified, which Jan should have figured from the great time they’d been making and that fact that his feet hadn’t worn down into bloody nubs, but hadn’t because he was hopeful of being done with walking.
Her daughter lived here, it turned out. Ivga hedged on whether this little hamlet was on their way to the city or not. Juri and Linke weren’t happy about that. Frank didn’t seem to care. He was too busy admiring the eye-searing quality of the locals’ clothes and the women’s intricate hairstyles. Jan wondered if he could get one of them to make Juri’s hair look like that. He already pulled it back most of the time, so he probably wouldn’t mind too much. It was certainly long enough.
Stepping up to a hut with a dull red, grass covering over the opening, Ivga rapped her knuckles against the frame before pulling the opening aside and going in. She motioned for Jan to wait outside.
When she came out again, she looked a different person.
“It is good to wear real clothes again,” Ivga said with a soft sigh. Jan wasn’t sure what she meant by “real clothes” since the layers upon layers of colorful robes (dresses? Aprons? Coats? Jan had no idea) she had on looked far less comfortable than the fur wrap she had been wearing earlier. “I…could ask for more, yes?” She looked pointedly at him, her ancient, now kohl-rimmed eyes smiling.
“Uh, that’s okay.” His clothes hadn’t really dried out from when the Yuluks had put them by the fire and they were stiff with salt in places, but Jan was not, uh, cool with walking around in pink and green, and orange like the most colorblind person ever. It also kind of looked like it wouldn’t keep out the chill none of the locals seemed to notice. He’d stick with his arctic wear.
A woman pushed aside the dyed grass hanging covering the hut Ivga had gone into. She was taller than Ivgalrea with black hair tied up in twists and complicated knots and haughty, black-brown eyes. The shape of her face made it clear she and Ivgalrea were related.
“My daughter,” Ivga said, gesturing, “Svabalrea.”
“Jan,” Jan said because shaking hands was not a universal thing and he didn’t want to get attacked or anything. Svabalrea had a big-ass hatchet on a bright blue leather cord around her waist. The blue clashed amazingly with the yellow and orange of the rest of her outfit.
Svabalrea muttered something to her mother in their language. It didn’t sound very pleasant.
“Svabalrea found people…like you,” Ivga said. She held up two fingers. “Men. They are inside.”
“Timo and David,” Jan breathed, rushing into the hut Svabalrea had come out of, which was probably completely rude but there were more important things than politeness when people you thought were dead showed up alive and well and-
It wasn’t them.
The joy inside Jan dropped but didn’t sink completely. He knew who these people were, and he’d thought them dead, too. Frank, who had followed Jan in, recognized them before Jan could so much as say “hi”.
“Jo! Fabi!” he said, leaping forward and instantly beginning to chatter at lightning speed.
A few years ago, they’d worked together in Siberia studying the Sireniki Eskimo people. Jan had spent most of the time learning how they constructed umiaks and left the rather horrifying traditional tales- Jan wasn’t being rude, all traditional stories were fucking horrifying; rape and murder, and incest with a nice little dash of what the fuck, all rolled up in a giant misunderstanding of basic science- to Linke and David. Jo, his brother, and his, uh, boyfriend or whatever had spent their time listening to any music the Sireniki were willing to share, which wasn’t a lot since the Sireniki pretty much hated their guts by the second month when the field team and their presents stopped being interesting. It had been alright, if really cold. About as cold as it was here, in fact.
Mäx noticed the rest of them.
“I see you all survived. Mostly.”
“Four isn’t most,” Linke, shoving the reddened grass aside, countered sourly. “Add you three and that’s seven. We’ve got more than eight missing. Not even half what we started with.”
“We saw Timo- uh, two other people get to shore. They just didn’t come with us.” Jan felt that needed to be added. Timo and David weren’t dead. They weren’t.
“We ditched the Kaulitzes and their minions,” Jo said, twisting his face into an ugly expression. Jan was pretty ambivalent towards the leaders of this expedition, but he wasn’t sure he would have ditched them. Granted, they probably wouldn’t have been too useful in a survival situation. They also had Halla and the captain, hopefully. “They wanted to stay where we washed up. Looks like we made the better decision.”
ØØØ
Timo couldn’t waive the feeling that someone else was out there- and not someone they knew. Even if the others had survived the avalanche (which Timo fervently hoped), the feeling he got was…of being surrounded, eyes in the trees, that sort of thing. He told himself he’d watched one too many fantasy movies and tried to let it go, but the feeling stayed with him.
It all made him very uneasy.
They were following the path of least resistance, going wherever the rocks were smoothest and the ground the most level. Time and again, it turned into what Timo hoped were deer trails because, if not, not only was someone else here, they’d been here for a while.
There were stories of shipwrecked people surviving on the islands they’d become stranded on, of course there were. Sometimes they were friendly, sometimes they were elusive, and sometimes they were lethal.
Timo didn’t want to meet any of them.
The path was getting narrower, eventually becoming a gorge in the distance. It was the perfect place for an ambush, Timo’s idle mind told him (definitely too many fantasy movies), but the only other option was up. Timo didn’t like up.
There was no sign of any animal or human life in sight when the approached the gorge. The second they stepped inside, however, they were surrounded.
David uttered a sharp cry of surprise at the ghastly faces of their attackers. Shirtless, male and female, their bodies painted a sickly, inhuman ash-grey, they didn’t seem to notice the cold wind whipping past. Timo threw himself in front of David. Empty handed, he glared at their attackers, knowing it would do no good but trying all the same. He had to protect David: David was all that mattered.
“What do you want with us?” he demanded. Nothing. No answer.
Their machetes glinted in the sun, and Timo became truly afraid.
Previous
Next
Fabi had nothing against sleeping pressed against other people when circumstances demanded it or between Jo and Mäx when it was butt-freezing cold and they needed to be chest to back to keep warm. It definitely wasn’t the weirdest thing they had done together. Mäx was like his brother, and Jo was his brother. That came with a certain intimacy. So he was cool with doing what he had to do when he had to do it. He was not cool with waking up with something hard poking him in the back and the only possibilities being Mäx’s pocketknife (unlikely considering the size and shape) and Mäx’s other parts.
Nope, Fabi was definitely not going to lie there and deal with that.
He scrambled out from between Jo and Mäx quickly and then, partially because he was fucking traumatized (though not as traumatized as he would’ve been had it been Jo) and partially because he had to pee like a bitch, out of the hole Mäx had dug. He may have run mentally screaming for a good long way before finding a nice patch of snow to pee on.
When he was done and had zipped up his shitty pants that didn’t want to cooperate because they were soaked and dotted with falling snow, he decided to walk around a bit, mostly to, uh, avoid having to go snuggle between his brother and a hard-on he was not going to appreciate right then or, like, ever. The snow had cleared up overnight (Fabi guessed it was sometime in the late morning), and he could just make out some shaggy animal a ways off.
As he watched, eyes staying closed just a little too long every time he blinked, small bipeds slowly approached the animal, branches gathered in their hands. Probably, they were trying to scare the strange animal away from their territory. A biologist would likely find this interaction fascinating. Fabi, in his sleep-sluggish state, had trouble focusing his eyes on the sight.
Suddenly, the animal let out a wounded cry, a low bellowing sound similar to a cow’s, and staggered to the ground. The bipeds moved closer, brandishing their sticks. One of them raised his stick above the animal and thrust it downwards, piercing the animal’s hide.
They weren’t sticks at all. They were spears.
“Holy shit,” Fabi said. “Those are people!”
ØØØ
It wasn’t that the people Fabi had found were hostile, because they weren’t. Jo could deal with hostile by being hostile right back. If that didn’t work, he could shove Mäx at them. If that didn’t work, he’d throw Fabi their way because nobody could hate Fabi. He was annoying as shit sometimes but not hateable. Hostile was easy to deal with.
No, these assholes were nosy. They got all up in Jo and Mäx, and Fabi’s spaces (less Fabi than Jo or Mäx, but our hero will get to that in a moment), picking at clothing and plucking at necklaces and armbands, sticking their fingers in places they did not belong, and just generally being enormous nuisances.
At least, that’s how Jo saw it. Fabi was very happy to pick, pluck, and stick right back at them.
They, of course, didn’t speak any recognizable language.
ØØØ
It was disconcerting being underground for so long. The grass mats made Linke’s skin itch long after he’d stopped touching them, but that was as nothing against the intense terror he felt when he saw so much rock overheard and only a bit of light far in the upper distance. No one needed to know any of this, of course.
Their hosts, the Neanderthal-like people who didn’t speak a lick of any language Linke knew except for the woman Jan had befriended, moved in and out of the cave, easily tracking their way up the breakdown. Linke chose not to watch once he had to look up to see them. Only the lucky could survive that fall.
Something told him the old woman wasn’t someone to be trusted. Her own people kept away from her; didn’t talk to her. They had been less friendly once they saw that Jan and Juri were talking to her. But she spoke German and that was far more effective than any charades could ever be.
So Linke got up from where he had been sorting through his pack, looking for anything that might prove useful and just basically trying to figure out what else Frank had shoved in there. There were a few notebooks, a phone (worthless), batteries of different sizes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, pens and pencils, a book to read, and sample bags. From Frank, a comb, a utensil set and bowl, two carving knives wrapped in a dish towel that Linke wasn’t going to ask about, some dry clothes belonging to both him and Juri, and seven pull-tab cans of food. This explained a lot. It also hardened Linke’s resolve to make Juri carry the pack from that point on. There was no good reason Juri couldn’t lug his own shit around.
He placed the pack down next to Juri, who flicked his eyes to it for a second before looking away. Annoyed, Linke picked it up and dropped it to the ground, where it made a satisfying thunk from all the cans.
“Your turn,” he said. Juri nodded and waved at him to sit down, which Linke did. But not because Juri told him to.
Jan’s new friend, who called herself Ivgalrea (Jan had botched the name the first few times he tried to tell Linke, causing Juri to patiently correct him- Juri’s patience with Jan would have been astounding if not for the very simple fact that the guy would do anything if it got him that much closer to having Jan naked, willing, and under him), had gathered a woven bowl filled with dirt. Sitting on her calves on (as per the local custom, it seemed), she upended the bowl onto a patch of bare stone and smoothed it out with her hands.
“What’s going on?” Linke asked.
“She’s gonna tell us about the island,” Jan said, face bright with excitement. Linke hadn’t shared his worries with Jan about Ivgalrea. She didn’t seem out to hurt him, at least.
“Six groups live on this island.” Ivgalrea drew a loose circle in the dirt, then four dots presumably to represent the cardinal directions. “People you see around you are Yuluk. They live wherever they can, mostly in caves. Mountain people live here.” She drew a small crescent along the northeastern side. “Beyond steppes is valley. On north side live Utmoak. On south side live Kumjenak. Big River flows from mountains into valley. Wherever the River flows, there are river people, Lachik.”
“I thought you said there were six?”
“Sixth move with herds.” Ivgalrea shrugged her shoulders. “We only see in late summer. They keep to themselves.”
“So, we go into the valley and try to find the river people, hoping they’ll agree to do what?”
“Lachik tell stories about another island far to the south, about people with light-colored eyes…and pale hair.”
“It could be Iceland,” Frank offered.
“It also could be someone else entirely,” Linke contradicted. “Why would they help us?” he asked the old woman.
“They are from your world, no? A people with yellow hair-” She looked pointedly at Jan and Juri- “who travel in enormous boats, wearing clothing river people have seen nowhere else.”
Juri didn’t look too happy with that.
“If Icelanders have met the river people before, why hasn’t the world heard of this place?”
“Do you follow Icelandic news?” Jan asked.
“…no,” Juri said reluctantly, looking like it pained him. Mentally, Linke rolled his eyes. Because Jan really cared whether Juri regularly read Icelandic news. That man was just sad sometimes.
“Exactly.”
A strange look passed over Frank’s face but was just as quickly replaced with a benign smile when Linke looked his way. Linke would worry, but it was Frank. He’d probably just had an actual thought for once.
ØØØ
The Neanderthals, who Linke now knew to be the Yuluk, produced a feast in their honor. Bowl after woven bowl was laid out, filled with cooked vegetables and roots. A cervid had been killed and roasted over a spit for several hours, the smell of cooked meat filling the cave. Scapulae from large ruminants served as plates, shaped vertebrae as cups. With Ivgalrea doing sparse translating, some understanding was reached.
Things seemed to be going well until Juri asked Lakti, the headman, if he knew where they could find a boat. Midway through the translation, Lakti began yelling at Ivgalrea. She responded to this by doing some yelling of her own, this little, hunched over old lady taking on a burly man in the prime of his life. It was, needless to say, not propitious.
When they finally calmed down, Ivgalrea declined to translate what Lakti had said. She explained that- and this Linke didn’t believe for a second- Lakti had put her in charge of helping them find a boat. The Lachik, she said, would be able to help them.
“It…take several days to get to Lachik’s main camp,” Ivgalrea said, looking warily at Lakti. The headman had his arms folded across his chest. All the other Yuluks were looking carefully away or concentrating far too intently on their food. “If we find Lachik along Big River, less.”
Linke stopped her.
“Why are you really helping us, Ivgalrea? What’s in it for you?”
Ivgalrea paused, considering.
“I want to leave this island,” she said Juri-slow. Her eyes darted towards Lakti before looking at the four of them in turn, almost as those she was pleading with them. What reason could an old woman have to plead with them? They were lost, shipwrecked on an island far from anyone they knew. They had nothing Linke saw that they could offer her, and that made him more than a little suspicious. “These people- they are not good to me, my family. They call my grandmother a sorceress. Now that I am old, they call me also. We travel, my mother and I, when I was a child. We looked for someone who would be good to us. Everywhere was same. No good. I am…tired of fear. I am tired of this island.
“I will lead you to Lachik, but you must take me with you.”
“Done,” Linke said immediately, not bothering to confer with the others. Jan was gung-ho for Ivgalrea to go with them, it was all over his face, Juri would go along with whatever Jan wanted, and Frank was too polite to stop Ivgalrea even if he wanted to. “You show us the way; we’ll take you with us.”
ØØØ
They left an hour later. Lakti seemed eager for them to leave, piling them with gifts of furs and sustenance but asking for nothing in return. There were places where hospitality was a quasi-sacred duty, but, in those instances, hospitality was usually extended to fellow travelers or one’s countrymen. The feeling that something was being kept hidden from them remained with Linke.
The headman’s words to Ivgalrea as they prepared to leave were harsh, the condescending tone coming across perfectly for all the language differences. She returned in kind, standing up as straight as her age-hunched back would allow. It was an uncomfortable spectacle, just like this morning had been.
In the end, though, some conclusion was reached- hopefully not Ivgalrea getting banned from the cave for life or anything because Jan or Frank would likely feel horrible about something none of them could control- and the elderly woman told them they could leave.
There weren’t any goodbyes to say, in all truth, so it was a bit odd when Frank stopped and said that he would “just be a minute”. Jan pouted, not unreasonably, when Frank produced a chocolate bar from his pack and unwrapped it before giving it to the headman. After some pantomiming of eating it, Frank got its use across and they were able to get on their way.
A little part of Linke smiled inside when Frank trotted up to walk beside him.
ØØØ
“So, do you know how to get off this island?” Jan, kicking a loose rock out of the way, asked Ivgalrea. The old woman’s expression shifted to one of puzzlement, her wrinkles deepening in her confusion. Jan repeated his question in simpler words.
“I have never…left,” she told him. “Almost no one leaves. The wind…and the sea. They are hard. Ships founder.” Jan nodded. They’d learned that about five minutes before they’d followed Juri’s bellowed command and plunged into the ocean. “But there may be someone in city who know.” It was the first long sentence she had said without any mistakes or pauses. Actually, Jan wasn’t sure about that. His brain played tricks on him sometimes, making things make sense when they didn’t, so maybe he was just getting used to how she talked and his brain was editing everything to make it easier to understand. Either way, Ivgalrea wasn’t talking as brokenly as before.
“City?” Jan echoed. “What city?”
“Yeah,” Frank said, sliding over. “What city?”
“You did not think we were all people here, did you?” She laughed, sounding uncomfortably like a witch cackling. Oh, great, this sweet old lady was going to kill them and it was all going to be Jan’s fault because he talked to her and, like, what if he was starting to understand her because she’d put a spell on him? That would be so messed up…and impossible. Impossible like living, breathing wooly mammoths and people living, actually freaking living, in the Stone Age. “There is…city two days’ walk from here. From city, it is possible to go anywhere.”
Jan didn’t ask why Ivgalrea had never tried to leave if it was “possible to go anywhere”, why a little, old lady would choose to live up in the frozen steppes if she could live in a nice, big city.
He really should have asked.
ØØØ
It was a collection of huts, was what he meant. Well, not really huts, more like hide and brush covered wooden frames, but Jan didn’t have a word for that, so he was calling them huts.
Ivgalrea- who Jan was calling Ivga from now on since she’d said that was okay- had said her daughter lived there.
“This is not city,” Ivga clarified, which Jan should have figured from the great time they’d been making and that fact that his feet hadn’t worn down into bloody nubs, but hadn’t because he was hopeful of being done with walking.
Her daughter lived here, it turned out. Ivga hedged on whether this little hamlet was on their way to the city or not. Juri and Linke weren’t happy about that. Frank didn’t seem to care. He was too busy admiring the eye-searing quality of the locals’ clothes and the women’s intricate hairstyles. Jan wondered if he could get one of them to make Juri’s hair look like that. He already pulled it back most of the time, so he probably wouldn’t mind too much. It was certainly long enough.
Stepping up to a hut with a dull red, grass covering over the opening, Ivga rapped her knuckles against the frame before pulling the opening aside and going in. She motioned for Jan to wait outside.
When she came out again, she looked a different person.
“It is good to wear real clothes again,” Ivga said with a soft sigh. Jan wasn’t sure what she meant by “real clothes” since the layers upon layers of colorful robes (dresses? Aprons? Coats? Jan had no idea) she had on looked far less comfortable than the fur wrap she had been wearing earlier. “I…could ask for more, yes?” She looked pointedly at him, her ancient, now kohl-rimmed eyes smiling.
“Uh, that’s okay.” His clothes hadn’t really dried out from when the Yuluks had put them by the fire and they were stiff with salt in places, but Jan was not, uh, cool with walking around in pink and green, and orange like the most colorblind person ever. It also kind of looked like it wouldn’t keep out the chill none of the locals seemed to notice. He’d stick with his arctic wear.
A woman pushed aside the dyed grass hanging covering the hut Ivga had gone into. She was taller than Ivgalrea with black hair tied up in twists and complicated knots and haughty, black-brown eyes. The shape of her face made it clear she and Ivgalrea were related.
“My daughter,” Ivga said, gesturing, “Svabalrea.”
“Jan,” Jan said because shaking hands was not a universal thing and he didn’t want to get attacked or anything. Svabalrea had a big-ass hatchet on a bright blue leather cord around her waist. The blue clashed amazingly with the yellow and orange of the rest of her outfit.
Svabalrea muttered something to her mother in their language. It didn’t sound very pleasant.
“Svabalrea found people…like you,” Ivga said. She held up two fingers. “Men. They are inside.”
“Timo and David,” Jan breathed, rushing into the hut Svabalrea had come out of, which was probably completely rude but there were more important things than politeness when people you thought were dead showed up alive and well and-
It wasn’t them.
The joy inside Jan dropped but didn’t sink completely. He knew who these people were, and he’d thought them dead, too. Frank, who had followed Jan in, recognized them before Jan could so much as say “hi”.
“Jo! Fabi!” he said, leaping forward and instantly beginning to chatter at lightning speed.
A few years ago, they’d worked together in Siberia studying the Sireniki Eskimo people. Jan had spent most of the time learning how they constructed umiaks and left the rather horrifying traditional tales- Jan wasn’t being rude, all traditional stories were fucking horrifying; rape and murder, and incest with a nice little dash of what the fuck, all rolled up in a giant misunderstanding of basic science- to Linke and David. Jo, his brother, and his, uh, boyfriend or whatever had spent their time listening to any music the Sireniki were willing to share, which wasn’t a lot since the Sireniki pretty much hated their guts by the second month when the field team and their presents stopped being interesting. It had been alright, if really cold. About as cold as it was here, in fact.
Mäx noticed the rest of them.
“I see you all survived. Mostly.”
“Four isn’t most,” Linke, shoving the reddened grass aside, countered sourly. “Add you three and that’s seven. We’ve got more than eight missing. Not even half what we started with.”
“We saw Timo- uh, two other people get to shore. They just didn’t come with us.” Jan felt that needed to be added. Timo and David weren’t dead. They weren’t.
“We ditched the Kaulitzes and their minions,” Jo said, twisting his face into an ugly expression. Jan was pretty ambivalent towards the leaders of this expedition, but he wasn’t sure he would have ditched them. Granted, they probably wouldn’t have been too useful in a survival situation. They also had Halla and the captain, hopefully. “They wanted to stay where we washed up. Looks like we made the better decision.”
ØØØ
Timo couldn’t waive the feeling that someone else was out there- and not someone they knew. Even if the others had survived the avalanche (which Timo fervently hoped), the feeling he got was…of being surrounded, eyes in the trees, that sort of thing. He told himself he’d watched one too many fantasy movies and tried to let it go, but the feeling stayed with him.
It all made him very uneasy.
They were following the path of least resistance, going wherever the rocks were smoothest and the ground the most level. Time and again, it turned into what Timo hoped were deer trails because, if not, not only was someone else here, they’d been here for a while.
There were stories of shipwrecked people surviving on the islands they’d become stranded on, of course there were. Sometimes they were friendly, sometimes they were elusive, and sometimes they were lethal.
Timo didn’t want to meet any of them.
The path was getting narrower, eventually becoming a gorge in the distance. It was the perfect place for an ambush, Timo’s idle mind told him (definitely too many fantasy movies), but the only other option was up. Timo didn’t like up.
There was no sign of any animal or human life in sight when the approached the gorge. The second they stepped inside, however, they were surrounded.
David uttered a sharp cry of surprise at the ghastly faces of their attackers. Shirtless, male and female, their bodies painted a sickly, inhuman ash-grey, they didn’t seem to notice the cold wind whipping past. Timo threw himself in front of David. Empty handed, he glared at their attackers, knowing it would do no good but trying all the same. He had to protect David: David was all that mattered.
“What do you want with us?” he demanded. Nothing. No answer.
Their machetes glinted in the sun, and Timo became truly afraid.
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